Between 1971 and 1974 Stephen King wrote four novels that were eventually published between 1977 and 1982 under the name Richard Bachman. Two are realistic stories about men suffering nervous breakdowns, one in a high school, one in his suburban home, and two are dystopian science fiction novels about homicidal game shows. What unites all four of these books is one major theme: rage. A red thread of rage runs through every single sentence in these four books, which begin with a student murdering two teachers in a high school classroom and end with a man flying an airplane into an office building. All four books are about powerless men lashing out at the fathers in their lives, whether it’s their actual fathers (Rage, The Long Walk) or themselves (Roadwork, The Running Man). This is where we take a moment to say something trite about King’s father who abandoned his family when King was 2 years old, but I’m going to resist that urge because these angry, feverish books deliver a valuable portrait of the author at the beginning of his career. And the thing they all state, clearly and unmistakably, is that at this point in his life King was, as he once said, “fucking furious.”
Determining exactly when this anger began to appear on the page is almost impossible. King has given dates for writing these books that conflict with dates given by his editor at the time, Bill Thompson, and he has also fudged their titles in past interviews since for several years he wasn’t supposed to be Richard Bachman at all. I’ve tried hard to split the difference here but I’m going to mess up.*
King said that he wrote the first forty pages of Rage in high school, but he also said he began writing Rage in earnest during the summer of 1966 right after he graduated from high school, and he’s also said that he finished its first draft in early 1971. Additionally, there’s a very long and winding road from this 1971 draft (then called Getting It On) to the version that would eventually be published in 1977 as Rage.
First, once King had a finished manuscript, he read The Parallax View and thought it sounded a lot like his book because both feature protagonists whose steadily declining mental health leads them to an act of violence (taking his class hostage in Rage, political assassination in Parallax — King would write his own political assassination novel with The Dead Zone). So, he wrote a query letter to Doubleday, addressed to “The Editor of The Parallax View”, who was out sick that day, so the letter landed on the desk of editor Bill Thompson. Acquisitions at Doubleday had to be approved by their publishing board and King, probably with Thompson’s input, made revisions to Rage to make the board more likely to say “yes.”
They didn’t. Rage wouldn’t see print until 1977 when it was published under Richard Bachman’s name, and for the 7 years between 1977 and 1984 when King was outed as Bachman, he was very careful to erase all mentions of Getting It On/Rage in order to protect his Bachman identity. And it’s almost guaranteed that King took another editorial pass, although who knows how extensive, on the book before it was published in 1977. So what we have is a book started around 1966, finished in 1971, and reworked and edited many times over the next six years.
But memories of high school were still fresh in King’s mind when he began writing Rage, which was a more mature version of the stories he used to write in grade school that featured his classmates taking over their elementary school before being gunned down by the National Guard. In Rage, Charlier Decker, a high school senior, gets called into the principal’s office and suspended for beating his chemistry teacher with a wrench. Charlie walks to his locker, takes out a gun, walks into his algebra class, and shoots the teacher. Then he shoots the history teacher. Then he takes the class hostage. Police surround the school and all the hostages agree that the enemy of their enemy is their friend and The Man is their real enemy. Unburdening themselves of their secret shames, Breakfast Club-style, they bare their hearts, beat a popular student into a catatonic state, and Charlie attempts suicide by cop. He fails and is sent to a mental institution.
Set in a fully imagined version of King’s Lisbon High, it’s a dry run for Carrie, another book about a bullied, isolated kid with an abusive parent who boils over with pent-up anger, lashing out at their fellow students in an orgy of violence. The template for both books is not only King’s alma mater, Lisbon High, but also John Farris’s Harrison High books. Farris had written Harrison High in 1959 and its sequel The Girl From Harrison High in 1968 and reading them today feels like reading the non-horror version of Carrie. King was a fan of Farris’s books and they showed him how you could write a sprawling, multi-character novel set in a high school that took its characters seriously and went beyond good girl/juvenile delinquent caricatures. King had already attempted a riff on Farris with a book called Sword in the Darkness, about a high school that explodes into a race riot, engineered by a gang that wants to use it as a cover for a series of robberies, but he’s since dismissed that book as DOA.
Rage, however, feels vital and alive because King dropped the complicated plot mechanics and zoomed in on a single character, writing in first person (something he wouldn’t do again until Dolores Claiborne in 1992). He also put something very personal on the page: his anger. A man taking a gun into a public place was very much on King’s mind at the time. In 1968, he wrote a short story about a college student who sticks his rifle out his dorm room window and goes on a shooting spree (“Cain Rose Up”). Right after that he wrote an early draft of “The Body” which ends with a kid putting a gun in a bully’s face. In 1973 he wrote Roadwork, which ends with a man having an armed stand-off with the police, and around 1974 he wrote “Apt Pupil” which ends with a kid picking off passing motorists with his rifle. What’s strange about all of these stories is the cold, dispassionate voices of the characters doing the killing. They’re not sure why they’re doing what they’re doing and they seem to go about their massacres in a methodical, matter-of-fact manner. In “The Body” there is heartbreak and sadness and anger, but the shooters in Rage, “Cain Rose Up”, “Apt Pupil”, and Roadwork do their shooting with a shrug.
It’s exciting to read Stephen King when he’s just some guy and not “Stephen King: Master of Horror.” His gift for visuals is already evident, and his descriptions of violence are short, sharp, and surprising. He has a good knack for human behavior, like the moment when Charlie kills the teacher and the only person who screams is a really unpopular girl. If anyone else had screamed, Charlie says, he would have run away.
School shootings are horrific, but this is definitely not a horror novel, and a marketing department would probably not hesitate to label it a psychological thriller. King said in a later interview that everything in his life would have been different if his first novel had been Rage instead of Carrie, if he had started out as a writer of “psychological thrillers” rather than as “Mr. Horror Guy.” However, he added, “in the long run, the monster would have come out.”
I hate to break it to you, but the monster is already out. These pages drip with castration imagery, detailed descriptions of women having their noses sliced off, a three year old boy waking up in the middle of the night convinced he’s dead, that same child’s night time terror of The Creaking Thing coming down the hall to get him, which turns out to be — even worse — the sound of his parents having sex. Even the story of Charlie’s parents meeting for the first time involves a woman burning to death. This is clearly a horror writer in the making.
The biggest flaw in the book are the windows. Committed to his first person point of view, King is trapped in the classroom with Charlie, but he also wants to depict the cops arriving and congregating outside, passing around free doughnuts and coffee. So, King puts a big row of windows in the back of the classroom through which Charlie can see them and describe what they’re doing. Later in the book, much will be made of Charlie’s decision to lower the blinds. However, for the previous two thirds of the book the police don’t seem to notice the windows at all. They communicate with Charlie through the intercom system, and they never approach the windows. King needs the windows for Charlie, but he doesn’t want them there for the cops, so he just ignores them. He cheats. It’s one of the only times in his career that he’ll cheat, and the only time he’ll do it so obviously, but give the guy a break. He did start writing this book in high school.
King also uses Rage to purge himself of another writerly trait. As the kids in the classroom bare their souls to each other (or, as King puts it, as they “get it on”) Charlie joins in. It turns out that he hates his father who beat him when he was a kid, and who uses any opportunity to torment him. He relates in great detail getting dragged along on a hunting trip from hell where he overhears his Dad describing in gruesome detail how he wants to castrate his wife’s lover and mutilate her face with his knife. Bad Dad = Sad Son = Armed Standoff
It’s all very Freud 101 and by the time King’s gotten to Carrie this kind of “If A Then B” psychological backstory will be in his rear view mirror. His characters will feel more like people he’s seen in his own life, and less like people he read about in a book. In fact, you can already see that tendency forming in Rage. Up until about Chapter 17 the book is all Charlie, all the time, but then other students start to speak up, revealing their hopes, dreams, and fears, fighting with each other, comforting each other, and they all sound a lot more convincing than the main character It’s like King started this book locked inside his own head and halfway through decided to actually listen to the what the other characters had to say.
Rage possesses a real empathy for its female characters, including a gorgeously observed sequence in which one girl, Carol, talks about how she wants to stay a virgin not because she’s a prude but because the world breaks you down, it just grinds you down, and sex is just one more way they wear you out. Another student, Grace, seems to be rough draft of Carrie White, all second-hand clothes and acne and awkwardness. And when a girl named Sandra confesses that her sexual awakening left her feeling nothing inside, Charlie observes that his confession about Daddy seemed a bit empty in comparison. “Sandra’s story seemed to have so much more power than my own,” he observes.
A few years later, King would apply Charlie’s observation to himself, and write another book about a high school student pushed to the breaking point. But that character will be a woman, and the parent she lashes out at is her mother, not her father. And that proved to make all the difference.
But for now, in the winter of October, 1971, Stephen King’s journey with Rage ended with a letter from Bill Thompson at Doubleday.
“Dear Stephen
I am embarrassed and ashamed to tell you we will not be publishing Getting It On. There are a variety of reasons, none consoling to you, and none pertinent to your writing. We published Crisis, which is similar to Getting It On in genre. It did not do well, and the memory lingers on. Then too, the entire fiction market, particularly for the untried author, has become fiercely competitive and publishers have become reluctant about taking a chance.
I know how meaningless and frustrating that sounds to you, especially after the length of time I’ve had your script, but there is no other way for me to tell you. I’m personally still sold on you as a writer and as a publishing property. And I could understand if you dealt Doubleday out of future submissions.
Stephen, if you want, I’ll shop Getting It On to editor friends at other houses, but since you have an agent it might be wiser to let her do it, rather than create a “we rejected but ____” impression elsewhere. I’ll hold the script until I hear from you.
I’m truly sorry, Stephen, that we can’t work together on this one, but for what it’s worth you are a writer and the times and economy will find out sooner or later.
All best, William G. Thompson, editor, Special Projects.”
It’s an incredibly kind letter, and the career advice is above and beyond what’s expected of a busy editor. But it wasn’t money in the bank, and King needed money. He’d just gotten married and soon they would have a baby on the way. He needed cash. And ironically, after spending so much time writing about the failures of the American educational system and a teenager murdering two high school teachers, King found what the money he needed by becoming a high school teacher himself.
* My sources for dates are:
Stephen King: The Art of Darkness (1984) by Douglas E. Winter
Stephen King As Richard Bachman (1985) by Michael Collings
Interview with Bill Thompson (2018) conducted by Jerad Walters
“On Becoming a Brand Name” (1980) by Stephen King
Danse Macabre (1981) by Stephen King
“Why I Was Bachman” (1985) by Stephen King
“The Importance of Being Bachman” (1991) by Stephen King
On Writing (2000) by Stephen King
“Gun” (2013) by Stephen King