Rage: Book Review

I just finished reading Rage, by Richard Bachman. This is an early novel by Stephen King, and it is undoubtedly one of his more controversial novels, even for King himself, as he has allowed it to fall out of print. According to wikipedia, five incidents involving students going to school with guns have been inspired by this book. People were not killed in every incident, but in some they were. The book was written in 1977, and the inspired shootings and attempts didn't start to happen until a decade later. All the same, there were five.

As you can guess, the book is about Charlie Decker, a High School student who takes his class hostage with a gun, after killing his teacher. The novel explores his daddy issues, his problems with authority, and the general issues that teenagers face regarding sexuality in that time.

Controversy

On its face, the book comes off as remarkably poor taste to the average person (I guess?). I can only guess, because my second (unpublished) novel was also about a school shooting, and it was far nastier than this was. When I looked on goodreads, I saw that one review gave this book one star, suggesting that it justified the shooting and said it was the worst book he had ever read (morally speaking, if not in terms of quality), though I am paraphrasing. The frothing outrage was palpable. I imagine my guess is not too far off; and as I said, King let this book fall out of print. But it is worth considering the thought of hindsight. The phenomenon of school shootings is a social contagion, and it did not really take off in popular consciousness until Columbine in 1999. When you include the Rage craze that preceded it, then I guess this book actually inspired its own contagion that preceded the culture that we currently live in. We live in a post-Columbine and post-Sandy Hook society, and King did not write this book after those moments.

Premise

The basic premise is that Charlie Decker goes to school with a gun and kills his teacher, and then takes his fellow classmates hostage. But it's the way in which this premise is executed that makes this book stand out. King actually plays around with the concept of Stockholm Syndrome in the book, all the while touching on themes of hypocritical adults and daddy issues. This is part of the reason the review mentioned above was outraged. The reviewer was convinced that King was "glorif[ying]" Decker's actions. I don't think that was what was happening. At the same time, I am not at all surprised that there were shootings inspired by this very book.

King leans heavily into the sympathetic angle, when it comes to the portrayal of Charlie Decker's actions. You can fill in the blanks with what I mentioned above. And this almost certainly fed into the real world impact that this book ended up having. I couldn't help but compare it to the novel that I wrote while I was in college. While it was also about a school shooting, the manner in which it was executed was very different. There were multiple points of view, and none of them were particularly likeable. The main character, especially, was unlikeable. I doubt many people would be particularly inspired by my work. What I tend to write is people at their worst, and I doubt even the people who did relate to the main character actually wanted to relate to him. My book was about festering hatred and alienation, while King's book is about the hypocrisies inherent in society that show the absurdity in which we selectively condemn violence.

In fact, my book was not only written before I ever read this, this book was recommended to me by a beta reader, though it took me years to actually get to it; I decided to put my own book on the shelf, instead. It was actually Carrie by King, that was a major influence on my writing of that novel. If you are familiar with that book, then you'll understand the parallels.

Believability

One thing that is worth commenting on is the believability of the scenario. The fact that none of the real world scenarios went quite the way the perpetrators wanted them to—nor did they go in line with the book—says something, but it is also worth noting that this is a highly contingent scenario. The point is not necessarily that this series of events has a high likelihood of happening; indeed, the point might be the exact opposite of the case. What transpires on page is an amazing set of events that stands out precisely because no one is expecting it to happen.

That said, I think the believability of the story still could have been tweaked. Without spoiling too much, I will put it like this: Stockholm Syndrome is a part of the story. You can imagine what that entails. However, the manner in which it is distributed across the victims is both heavily skewed and fixed over time. If less people were on his side in the beginning, and more by the end, I think the story would have been more believable. In this story, there isn't much change in any obvious way.

Plot

Like The Long Walk, another Bachman book in the collection, this book does not have much of a plot; hell, like all of King's books. The major structure of the story is through flashbacks, though the way the flashbacks are delivered is through the chapter structure. One chapter will end on, "Charlie said:" and then the next chapter would simply pick up inside the flashback, as if Charlie and King are both the narrator. This was a change up from how The Long Walk was written, which was done almost entirely through dialogue. One thing I appreciated was how King was changing up his writing style even early in his career. This is not something that the average reader is likely to notice, but it stood out to me, at least.

Ending

I also liked the ending of the book. It stands out, because it shows the culmination in a process that had been undergoing over the course of the whole story. Unlike most King endings, there was actually build up to this ending, for the most part. I do have some gripes with the execution of the arc, but the ending itself was the perfect way to resolve the threads of the story.

Conclusion

Overall, this book was an interesting and engaging read. I think I will give it a 7/10.

Video: https://youtu.be/U-_G39Jd2CA