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.