You couldn’t see the letters that made my name anymore.

Richard Bachman. Rage. 1977.

Chronological complications arise when reading King’s books according to publication date. By that schema, the next book after The Shining is Rage, the first that King published under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. I’m including the Bachman novels in my reading of “King’s work,” since Stephen King still wrote them even if “Stephen King” didn’t publish them, and since whatever contrast there presumably is between the books published under his real name and those under Bachman’s ought to provide some insight into the books published under his own name–especially the ones about writers with creepy alter egos…

There seem to be a couple of reasons King started publishing under a pseudonym. First, his publisher didn’t want to put out more than one “Stephen King” a year, otherwise his books would potentially cut into each other’s sales. Second, under Bachman’s name King seems to have published a lot of the early work that he tried and failed to get published before breaking through with Carrie. According to his biographer Lisa Rogak:

He had several first drafts of completed novels and others he had written before he had written Carrie. While some writers may have considered these novels to be just apprenticeship books, learning opportunities and unpublishable, Steve wanted them to be given a chance to see the light of day as finished books.

Lisa Rogak. Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King. 2008.

Rogak leaves it at that, though there seems to be an implication that maybe these books shouldn’t have seen the light of day…King himself would eventually come to agree with this assessment about Rage, but more on that later.

Rage is also different from the first three novels King published under his own name in that it’s told from the first-person perspective, and contains not even a hint of a supernatural element–the horror is derived purely from the physically possible. No telepathy or vampires or literal ghosts. So we’ll see if sticking to the realistic is a definitive characteristic distinguishing the work of “Bachman” from the work of “King.”

As for chronology, Rage appeared under the Richard Bachman name in 1977, a few months after The Shining, but King actually wrote it as Getting It On back when he was in college. He sent the manuscript to his eventual publisher Doubleday not long after he graduated, where it gained him the initial attention of his longtime friend and editor Bill Thompson, and he did several rounds of revision on it at the publisher’s behest before it was ultimately rejected.

Another King expert, George Beahm, provides some context about the genesis of what was initially Getting It On, locating it in the summer after King graduated from high school in 1966:

This novel, which took its title from a rock ‘n’ roll song by T. Rex, “Bang a Gong (Get It On),” was an intense psychological study, tapping into King’s fears in high school of being an outsider, a time when he characterized himself as being filled with rage, worried whether or not he’d go crazy.

George Beahm, Stephen King: America’s Best-Loved Boogeyman. 1998.

Beahm later notes that the second Bachman book, The Long Walk, is the first novel manuscript that King actually completed. But in the sense of the themes it shares with Carrie, it feels appropriate that Rage is the first published Bachman book even if it isn’t the first one King actually finished…

So, the summary:

Rage is told from the first-person perspective of Charlie Decker, a senior at Placerville High School in Maine. Charlie is sitting in algebra class one morning when he’s called to the principal’s office. While waiting, he runs into a friend of his father’s who’s selling textbooks, causing him to recall a hunting trip he went on with his father’s friends when he was nine years old, where he overheard his father describe how he’d give Charlie’s mother a “Cherokee nose job” if he ever caught her cheating on him.  

Charlie is informed by the principal Mr. Denver that a teacher Charlie recently assaulted, Mr. Carlson, is recovering. When Mr. Denver wants to know why Charlie assaulted Mr. Carlson, Charlie is openly defiant and begins taunting him until Denver expels him. Charlie then goes to his locker, where he retrieves a pistol and some shells, then burns some of his textbooks to start a fire in it. He returns to his algebra classroom, where he shoots and kills the teacher, Ms. Underwood. The fire alarm goes off from his locker fire, and when another teacher, Mr. Vance, comes by the room to tell them to leave, Charlie shoots and kills him, too. 

Charlie takes his algebra class hostage and speaks to the principal over the intercom while police gather outside. When one of the hostage students asks why he’s doing what he’s doing, another suggests it must be because of his parents, leading Charlie to tell the story of how his parents met (his mother was his father’s sister’s college roommate at the University of Maine). He then tells his hostages about an incident when he was four and he broke his father’s storm windows for no reason, sowing discord between his parents.

Disgusted by Charlie’s blaming his parents, a boy named Ted Jones declares that he’s going to take Charlie’s gun away, but then another boy announces that he knows why Ted had to quit football and tells the class Ted’s mother is an alcoholic, information that Charlie uses to needle Ted into an emotional outburst. 

The counselor Mr. Grace then comes on the intercom, and Charlie baits him as well, pretending he’s shot someone when Mr. Grace accidentally asks a question after Charlie told him not to. When one of his classmates, a girl named Grace, cheers him on for breaking Mr. Grace down, another girl, Irma, lashes out at her, insulting her mother for being a whore. Charlie lays out rules for a controlled physical showdown in which Irma eventually admits she was wrong to call Grace and her mother whores and admits she did it because of her own insecurities. A boy nicknamed Pig Pen says he wishes he had the “stick” Charlie does so he could kill his mother. The police start hollering at Charlie through the window with a bullhorn, prompting him to shoot out the windows with random gunshots.  

Charlie’s classmates want him to “tell” something else, so he describes an incident when he was twelve and his mother forced him to go Carol Granger’s  birthday party in a corduroy suit when he knew no one else would be dressed up, and he ended up getting beaten up because of it. Carol Granger, who is a hostage in the algebra class (and slated to be valedictorian) admits she had a crush on the boy who beat Charlie up that day, and someone else mentions that the boy is dead now. 

A cop, Mr. Philbrick, gets on the intercom to try to negotiate with Charlie, to no avail. 

Carol Granger suggests that sex might have something to do with Charlie’s acting strangely, and he agrees to tell about his sex life if she tells about hers. Carol says she’s a virgin but can’t adequately explain why she is when Charlie needles her. Carol expresses solidarity with Charlie’s resistance, and another girl, Sandra Cross, admits that she always feels empty and that’s why she let Ted Jones have sex with her. This admission causes Charlie to pick up his pistol to shoot Ted, but when he leans forward to do it, a sharpshooter shoots him through the window. He’s saved when the bullet hits the padlock from his locker that he put in his breast pocket earlier that morning. He yells at the principal over the intercom, then gets Sandra Cross to resume her story about Ted. Sandra adds that after she had sex with Ted and didn’t get pregnant, she had sex with a random guy she picked up; her description of this encounter especially angers Ted. 

Admitting to himself that things are out of his control now, Charlie tells the story of when he and his friend Joe McKennedy visited the University of Maine, where he smoked a lot of dope and got really horny while flirting with a girl at a party but then lost his erection when she was ready to have sex, causing him to think he’s queer. He’s upset his story doesn’t command as much interest as Sandra’s. He lets Irma leave to go to the bathroom, and she returns to the algebra classroom of her own accord. 

Charlie tells Philbrick on the intercom that he’ll release everyone in an hour, and closes the classroom’s shades. He tells the story of the incident that led to his expulsion, how he assaulted the teacher Mr. Carlson with a pipe wrench he’d started carrying to school (primarily because of nervousness due to his bad stomach) after Mr. Carlson mocked him for being unable to do a problem on the board in front of the class. He then “got it on” with his father in a physical altercation afterwards (and started bringing his father’s pistol to school), and he realizes it’s his father he really wanted to kill, not his teachers.

Charlie asks everyone if they know what the last remaining order of business is, and everyone raises their hand except for Ted. Carol Granger says they have to show Ted “where he’s gone wrong.” When Ted tries to leave, everyone else attacks him while Charlie watches, beating him and smearing black ink on him. Charlie then releases everyone except Ted, who’s incapacitated. When Philbrick comes in, Charlie acts like he’s going to shoot him, causing Philbrick to shoot Charlie three times. 

Charlie is acquitted for the murders of Ms. Underwood and Mr. Carlson by reason of insanity and sent to an institution, where his friend Joe McKennedy writes him with an update on everyone’s progress and tells him everyone is “pulling for” him. Ted Jones is also sent to an institution, and does not recover. Charlie’s mother sends him the high-school yearbook, but he’s afraid he’ll see black ink on the pictures of his classmates if he looks at it. The hospital staff thinks he likes custard when he really doesn’t, and he feels better now that he has a secret again.   

The End.

-SCR