Horror Book # 50 - The Bachman Books by Stephen King - Book 1: Rage by Richard Bachman

Way back in the early 90's I went through a bit of a Stephen King phase... or so I thought. Looking back on it now I realize that I only completely finished two of his books at that time. Somehow though I owned maybe ten King books. I think it was maybe 200 pages into The Stand that I just got too busy with other stuff and wouldn't return to King for awhile. Anyway... a couple weeks ago I was reading an article about King that made me want to start in on his Dark Tower series. Plus I watched a new movie based on one of his books, Cell, that got me into looking at his entire bibliography. So then I found a good bunch of my old high school copies that I never read, dusted them off, and added them to my to-be-read shelf. But then I read that one of this books, Rage, was actually out of print. Of course this was one that I didn't own and it being the one book of his that is out of print because of the "sensitive nature" of what it is about only made me want to read it even more. So then I tracked down a used copy of The Bachman Books which contains Rage. So once again I was adding Stephen King books to my to-be-read shelf. Plus I put a library hold on a Kindle copy of the first Dark Tower. So maybe I'll be reading a bunch of Stephen King in the future.... But I also discovered over the last two months that being a parent of a newborn is pretty much all consuming and that finding time to sit down and read for more than two minutes at a time doesn't happen very often.

I think I read somewhere that King wrote the first draft of Rage as a teenager and it is one of his earliest publications. And that's what it reads like... but I mean that in a good way. It feels like a young King channeling his teenage angst into a pretty intense story with a good deal of emotion. Unlike some of his later work this feels like he's really writing from the heart. The story is pretty simple... one day a high school kid snaps, kills a couple of teachers, and takes his class hostage. Apparently there have been a few kids that have read this book and did exactly that... so that's why it is no longer available. I can understand why King would remove the book, it probably weighs on him the influence the book has had on some kids. Still, I enjoyed the book and I'll give it an A-.