RAGE by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

PUBLISHER: Signet, 9/1977
GENRE: Contemporary Fiction
SETTING: Maine, USA, May 1976
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: F

FROM PUBLISHER: A disturbed high-school student with authority problems kills one of his teachers and takes the rest of his class hostage. Over the course of one long, tense and unbearable hot afternoon, Charlie Decker explains what led him to this drastic sequence of events, while at the same time deconstructing the personalities of his classmates, forcing each one to justify his or her existence.

MY THOUGHTS: This is one shitty novella, around 130 pages, that's told from Charlie's point of view and only spans a few hours. The dialogue and student actions are totally unbelievable. Prime example, a girl said this after Charlie shot two teachers in the classroom, "Go Charlie! Fuck 'em all!" A boy asked him, after the first shooting, I believe it was, if he could do his homework. In the midst of it all two girls got into a verbal fight, calling each other whores and cunts. And about three times Charlie mentioned circle jerks, which, I won't lie, made me chuckle. One of the girls told of some sexual encounter in front of the class. WTF?! And the strangest and second most disturbing scene of all is towards the end when the class turned on one male student for no reason that I could see. The students held hostage seem to be as unstable as Charlie. Charlie even let one girl leave the classroom to go to the bathroom....and the fool came back instead of fleeing. To be completely honest, I disliked most of the students so much I was hoping he'd kill 'em all at the end. There really aren't any likable characters.

I'm not sure what sent Charlie down a murderous path. He said in chapter one that two years previous he began to lose his mind. We weren't privy to what was going through his mind then. He thinks his father hates him and he recited an incident to his class that happened when he was four and his father threw him onto the ground for breaking the windows. He seems to have had a basic childhood and is a virgin (and told a story about it to the class). Just a few months before the shootings, Charlie beat the chalkboard in chemistry class with a pipe wrench until it crumbled then hit his chemistry teacher, Mr. Carlson, in the head with it and fractured his scull.

The only part I liked at all was when Charlie reminisced in chapter 29 about a near physical altercation with his father while telling him off.

I've posted some images from inside the The Bachman Books here.

This story is also available as one of four stories in The Bachman Books, which can be found under the following ISBN's only: 9780451147363, B001IPV91A, 9780450392498, and 9780452257740, which is the version I have.

The current in-print edition doesn't contain this story but still has the other three. Rage as part of The Bachman Books went out of print in 1998 after a December 1997 U.S. school shooting so any version with a publication date after that won't contain this story.

I like the original cover a lot but Charlie looks much older than seventeen. In the 1983 edition with the yellow cover here, he definitely looks like a teenager.

Here are a few good reviews/articles on the novel at: Devouring Texts, Dead End Follies, Sharp Pencil, Between the Covers, The Guardian, 

School shooters/hostage takers inspired/possibly inspired by "Rage": Jeff Cox, Jeff Cox 2, Dustin Pierce, Dustin Pierce 2, Scott Pennington, Scott Pennington 2, Scott Pennington 3, Barry Loukaitis, Michael Carneal.

Here's how Stephen-writing-as-Bachman was exposed.

CRASH INTO ME: A SURVIVOR'S SEARCH FOR JUSTICE by Liz Seccuro

PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury USA, 1/2011
GENRE: Nonfiction/Memoir/True Crime
PURCHASE: link
AUTHOR SITE: link
MY GRADE: B+

FROM PUBLISHER: In September 2005, Liz Seccuro's world turned upside down when she received an apology letter from the man who had raped her twenty-two years earlier. The rape, which occurred when she was a seventeen-year-old freshman at the University of Virginia, was reported to the campus police, but their inquiry led nowhere. The man accused of raping her left the university soon after, and Seccuro tried to put the incident behind her, starting a business and a family, but like all survivors of trauma, the memory was never far from the surface.

The letter brought it all back. Seccuro bravely began an e-mail correspondence with her rapist to try to understand what happened, and why. As the correspondence continued, Seccuro found the courage to do what should have been done all those years earlier-prosecute him. She began appearing on national television and radio to talk about the case. Several crime dramas and a John Grisham novel, The Associate, were based on her experience. She had found a way to end a terrible story, but once judicial proceedings began, she found that what she thought occurred at that UVA frat party was only the tip of the iceberg. The investigation revealed at least two other assailants, numerous onlookers, and a wall of silence among the fraternity members that persisted two decades later.

MY THOUGHTS: I learned of Liz on an episode of I.D.'s Vanity Fair Confidential, Season 4, episode 1 titled Shadows on the Lawn. This is a well-written and easy to follow memoir about injustice-turned-justice, but barely.

Liz was at a frat party one night in 1984, a party she didn't even want to go to and only went to as a favor for her male friend, and was given a tart green-colored drink that was obviously drugged. She was there mentally at times but had trouble moving her limbs and was fading in and out of consciousness. She was carried into a bedroom and the lights were turned out and she was raped, and raped in another room by another male, and was raped digitally on the sofa by a third male while a few other men looked on. She's not sure what order this all happened in. She wasn't a rape victim who stayed silent. She did what she could at the time of the assault, October 1984, to see that her attacker was punished but was unsuccessful. Right after the rape she walked to the UVA medical center to tell them she was raped and was told by a nurse that they don't handle rape victims there, which makes no sense at all, and the nurse told her to go to another hospital far away. She was lied to right to her face several times by the disgusting male dean of UVA, Robert Canevari, about who had legal jurisdiction over the college. She was told the university had to deal with the situation themselves, not the Charlottesville police, which was a complete lie. The scumbag, who's hopefully six feet under now, tried to make her think she wasn't raped and just had a bad date and he even told her parents, right in front of her, that she was 'date raped', which wasn't true because there was no date. He suggested she transfer to another school and told her he had 'contacts' who could help with it. He'd already had the rapist, William Beebe, leave the school, thinking that would solve the problem and Liz would drop her complaint. Dean Canevari never even took a report of her story. In fact, several others didn't either. They just wanted to sweep the situation under the rug.

I have a bone to pick with her friends too. Lots of them came to her dorm room to comfort her but none of them offered to take her to a hospital.

Justice wasn't really served because William only spent five months in prison, due to Virginia not having a statute of limitations on rape, and the other two men who raped her got away with it because they wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement and by that point it had been twenty-two or three years since it happened.

Liz is very likable and very open about her ordeal and her struggle with panic attacks. I do think the book needed to be longer and I'd have liked more details on her first marriage at age twenty-three and I definitely wanted to read more of her correspondence with William Beebe. It needed information on how her parents were dealing with it over the years.

MURDER AT BEECHWOOD by Alyssa Maxwell

PUBLISHER: Kensington, 5/2015
GENRE: Historical Fiction/Mystery
SETTING: Rhode Island, USA, 1896
SERIES: Gilded Newport Mysteries, #3
AUTHOR SITE: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B-

FROM PUBLISHER: For Newport, Rhode Island’s high society, the summer of 1896 brings lawn parties, sailboat races…and murder. Having turned down the proposal of Derrick Andrews, Emma Cross has no imminent plans for matrimony—let alone motherhood. But when she discovers an infant left on her doorstep, she naturally takes the child into her care. Using her influence as a cousin to the Vanderbilts and a society page reporter for the Newport Observer , Emma launches a discreet search for the baby’s mother.

One of her first stops is a lawn party at Mrs. Caroline Astor’s Beechwood estate. But an idyllic summer’s day is soon clouded by tragedy. During a sailboat race, textile magnate Virgil Monroe falls overboard. There are prompt accusations of foul play—and even Derrick Andrews falls under suspicion. Deepening the intrigue, a telltale slip of lace may link the abandoned child to the drowned man. But as Emma navigates dark undercurrents of scandalous indiscretions and violent passions, she’ll need to watch her step to ensure that no one lowers the boom on her…

MY THOUGHTS: Let me start by saying this book has way too many characters, around twenty, most introduced within the first fifty pages. Most weren't even in the picture much. By the end of the book I still wasn't 100% sure who was who and had to keep looking at my notes to help me figure things out.

There were multiple mysteries going on at the same time, too many- who, if anyone, caused the explosion on the boat, who dropped the baby off at Emma's doorstep, who shot a carriage driver, who shot a maid, and so on. I was interested in all of it. The person(s) who did the crimes, or some of them, just wasn't believable. At least not to me. The motive(s) presented were ridiculous too.

Emma's character is too perfect, flawless actually, and she's clearly a genius at solving crimes, all on her own, and without help from another soul. Sure. I didn't get any backstory on her and that's very necessary for a main character. I realized that was probably given in book one of the series but the author should have recapped in the next two. I don't even know how old she is or what she looks like.

The book is flawed, I never really got to know any of the characters, but I was kept interested and was disappointed in the climax for being far-fetched. Emma's not a character I'd want to keep reading about because she's been written as someone I can't relate to.

I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK: ONE WOMAN'S OBSESSIVE SEARCH FOR THE GOLDEN STATE KILLER by Michelle McNamara

PUBLISHER: HarperCollins, 2/2018
GENRE: Nonfiction/True Crime
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: D

FROM PUBLISHER: For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

At the time of the crimes, the Golden State Killer was between the ages of eighteen and thirty, Caucasian, and athletic—capable of vaulting tall fences. He always wore a mask. After choosing a victim—he favored suburban couples—he often entered their home when no one was there, studying family pictures, mastering the layout. He attacked while they slept, using a flashlight to awaken and blind them. Though they could not recognize him, his victims recalled his voice: a guttural whisper through clenched teeth, abrupt and threatening.

MY THOUGHTS: Michelle's a great writer and I like her style and humor at times but she got off track quite a bit. I've been following this case since 2001 and she didn't do it justice. I liked the autobiographical parts a lot but most of it wasn't relevant to this case. As I feared, this was very much The Story of Michelle McNamara. There should have been background information on all of the victims, not just one. We got more on Michelle's than we did theirs. Example: So much time was spent on Cheri's failing relationship with her daughter which is fine, I genuinely like hearing about it and can related to it to a degree, but an equal amount of time should have been spent on telling us about Cheri's own background. I learned nothing at all about her childhood, and nothing about the childhood of most of the other victims, including Brian and Katie Maggoire. The story of the victims took a back seat to her own, which is such a shame because that's not how this should have been.

The crimes are out of order and instead of starting with the first rape in 1976 she jumps to a murder in 1981 and I can't figure out why. It's disjointed as hell. In the middle of a story about one of the crimes she'd get off track and start talking about the town it happened in. Back to the story, please.

Too many unimportant things were added, possibly to fill space, like pages dedicated to cleared suspects. Too bad the two guys who helped finish writing it, Paul Haynes and Billy Jensen, couldn't have cleaned it up more. I suspect they weren't allowed to mess with it too much. I don't see where they were thanked in the book by her husband Patton or the publisher.

One thing I found odd was her mentioning an issue a rape victim had with something a former investigator said about her in his book Sudden Terror. Why bring their drama to your own book? None of that is relevant to your book and it doesn't involve you. It was only done to try and shame Larry Crompton.

I don't think this book would have been published had she not been married to a celebrity. It seems rushed and unfinished and not too interesting. I don't think someone new to this case will care much about it, after reading this. I think a casual reader of true crime wouldn't be compelled by what they've read in this book to look into the other books about this criminal. To be honest, it's not as good as a few of the self-published ones on this case. This is the only book of the lot to have been published by a major publisher and it's a big disappointment because I know it could have been so much better.

I've uploaded some images from the book here.

Other nonfiction books on this case, listed in order of publication are:

Sudden Terror by Larry Crompton, detective on case

Hot Prowl by Jack Gray

Frozen in Fear by Jane Carson-Sandler, victim #5

Hunting a Psychopath by Richard Shelby, detective on case

Murder on His Mind by Anne Penn, relative of Lyman Smith

Case Files of the East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer by Kat Winters and Keith Komos (the best of the bunch)

Fiction- Terror at 3am: When PTSD Turns Deadly by Duane Wilson


I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.