Rage by Stephen King | The Book You're Not Supposed to Read

for as long as i've been reading literature i've always found that there is no better way to convince someone to read a book than to preface the recommendation with a note on its having been banned upon its publication it's ironic really because these attempts at diverting the eyes of the public away from work such as tropic of cancer catcher in the royal to kill a mockingbird to name a few just does the opposite in fact all it really does is place a huge asterisk next to these works and entices those intrigued enough to give them

a read themselves and those who do usually find the result to be anti-climactic anyway you could see how the work could be considered dirty maybe due to its content or language maybe there was more profanity used than usual but there was nothing really deserving of a widespread ban it's not like you left the book any more corrupted than when you went into it which is what you could say for the vast majority of classic novels just like the ones previously mentioned currently filling up her famous books that were previously banned list harmless at best however

there was one such book written by an author famously known for his disturbing and horrific tales that had been linked with real-life acts of violence to such an extent that the author in question pulled the book off of the shelves himself and has kept them off until present day the author in question was stephen king and the work was his 1977 book rage but before i elaborate further i must address the elephant in the room some may not have noticed but on the original cover instead of the credited author being stephen king it is in

fact credited to one richard bachmann allow me to explain [Music] during the 1970s stephen king was ascending to the celebrity status of being a household name with the release of carrie salem's lot and the shining king had been writing best sellers faster than his publishers could release them and that is not hyperbole it was genuinely the case for king as any fan will know king's work rate is incredibly high and his consistency is rarely forwarded throughout his career he typically writes at least six pages a day yet for king in the mid-1970s his ability to

churn out novels was both a blessing and a curse it was great that he was able to supply fans with more content to consume but the problem was his publishers the new american library were unwilling to release at the rate he was writing due to a fear of over-saturating the market with king novels leaving king with an attic full of unused manuscripts king was understandably frustrated by this and one day had decided he was going to publish these already completed work straight to paperback and under a pseudonym the idea being that this would solve the

problem of oversaturating the market whilst also answering a burning question that had lingered in the back of king's mind for a while of whether people were buying his books because they were good books or because they had the name stephen king on the cover and so king created the pen name guy pillsbury a name taken from king's maternal grandfather and guy was to release an old manuscript king wrote in 1966 and reworked to completion in 1971 unfortunately and at the last minute the pseudonym was outed and king had to change the name that was to

be attributed to his new persona's release as the publishers called to tell him of the last minute swap asking him for a new name to attribute the book to king had been at his desk phone in hand a richard stark novel laid to his right side whilst a bachmann turner overdrive record played out of the record player comprising the two together he responded with richard bachman and thus on the 17th of september 1977 men have released his first novel which was published straight to paperback and given the title rage the story of rage centers around

a high school senior at placerville high by the name of charlie decker who we are first introduced to as he has pulled out of an algebra class to speak to the school principal on an incident in which decker assaulted a teacher with a pipe wrench almost killing him as dekker laughs off the principal's attempt to disciplining him he makes his way back to class but not before stopping in his locker grabbing a pistol and lighting the locker itself on fire and on re-entry into the classroom decker is asked a question by the algebra teacher mrs

jean underwood to which she responds by shooting her in the face killing her instantly from here rage primarily takes place within the algebra classroom as decca holds the students hostage the story is also interspersed with flashbacks that consist mostly of examples of decker's abusive father and the events leading up to his decision to shoot up the school however what makes rage interesting is how the classroom of students all begin to sympathize and even identify with decca and in response they all bond by sharing sad and embarrassing stories about themselves in some weird group therapy session

yet there is one boy named ted jones who towards the end of the book along with everyone else in the room begins to realize that he is the only one being held hostage due to his reluctance to share his embarrassing stories which are in turn forced out of him there is mention in the story via decker of an astrological term called the terminator which is the line that divides the planet between the daylight side and the nighttime side in what is probably the most important chapter chapter 10 the chapter that directly follows decker's killing of

mrs gene underwood decca rant on his philosophy on sanity which is brought on by underwood's final word before being shot and which is also used as an epigraph to rage itself so you understand that when we increase the number of variables the axioms themselves never change decker elaborates on his understanding of logic and sanity via this quote using examples of i think therefore i am i have hairs on my face therefore i shave my wife and child have been critically injured in a car crash therefore i pray explaining how the axioms in these variables never

change however decker then begins to talk on the dark and illogical side to life and the mr hyde behind every happy jackal face the face that appears when illogical things happen such as war terrorist attacks or school shootings to which he then makes mention of the terminator line acting as a threshold between these two different aspects of the human mind this chapter is the most important as it distinguishes the differences between ted jones and charlie decker who in many ways throughout the book are shown to be more similar than you would expect one example of

their similarity is shown in the very beginning of the novel when decker points out how only himself and jones were the ones to pass an algebra test essentially alluding to both their intelligence they also both come from dysfunctional families as we are later shown when jones is made to confess his mother's alcoholism thus the two boys are essentially on the opposite sides of the terminator line but jones the light side in which he is still considered handsome and near perfect regardless of his personal issues and decker who lashes out and is violent and has now

killed two people as a result of his own in a way the two are two sides of the same coin however because decker is in power in the algebra classroom he calls the shots and seeing how jones does not go along with it like the others he is thus descended on by the rest of the students which results in jones being in a catatonic state after this decca sets the others free except jones and when a policeman enters decker attempts suicide by cop yet survives and in the final pages we are shown the consequences of

decker's actions in a report that states that he is seen as mentally unfit to stand trial at the given time and is thus sent to a hospital for treatment in the final lines decker writes from a psych ward addressing the reader pending the lines that's the end i have to turn off the lights now good night [Music] as rage had been a backman release and not a king release the sales of the book were next to none yet as backman began releasing more novels novels like the long walk road work and the running man he

had developed somewhat of a cult following before being discovered in 1985 and once he was discovered for who he really was people were eager to begin reading these new king novels that had been under their noses for the last eight years and that is when the incidents began to happen there was something about rage that identified with angsty high school students during the time and it did not take long until charlie decker's fictional takeover of placerville high had manifested itself onto the real world [Music] the first incident occurred in april 1988 when a san gabriel

californian high school student called joe cox took students in his english class hostage with a korean made 223 assault rifle whilst declaring urban terrorism is fun luckily he was rushed by a classmate and disarmed before killing anyone next on september 8th 1989 dustin l pierce senior at jackson county high school in maki kentucky took two handguns and a shotgun into his history class and took the class hostage for nine hours before releasing everyone seven years later on february 2nd 1996 barry lukatis a student at frontier middle school in moses lake washington entered his algebra class

shot two students killing two and wounding another before fatally shooting the teacher and stating this sure beats algebra doesn't it he then took students hostage letting them go in fragments eventually leaving one who fortunately overpowered barry and disarmed him and lastly december 1997 when fourteen-year-old michael carneal shot eight students killing three and injuring five during a prayer meeting at heath high school in kentucky carniel had dropped his weapon and shouted kill me please i can't believe i'd done that king had only heard of the latter two incidents by the late 90s but at that point

it was enough to pull rage off of the shelves as all four examples once they had been investigated on as king would later find out in regard to the former two have been connected to rage in one way or another some such as joe cox and dustin l pierce were inspired in a broader sense and in that i mean to just shoot up a school yet the second to last example barry lucatis had parroted decker in many ways during his shooting spree regardless all four had been found to have rage either in their locker or

at home and that was what sealed the deal for king yet king did not take any personal responsibility for the shootings as he would later elaborate on in his 2012 essay guns in which he dedicates a portion of it to rage the incidents connected with it and its subsequent removal in this portion king explains how the main issue of all four incidents stemmed from neglect and or abuse from the parents of these kids who committed these acts not his book yet he does show a responsibility for his work and its potential impacts on the youth

in which he perfectly articulates in this quote my book did not break [ __ ] pierce carniel or lucitus or turn them into killers they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken yet i did see rage as a possible accelerant which is why i pulled it from sale you don't leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it and now to end off i will explain the death of richard backman and how he was eventually found out to be king it all

began in 1985 when a man called steve brown then a bookstore clerk in washington dc who was also a huge king fanatic had begun reading thinner what brown had noticed about thinner was that it had strayed away from bachmann's previous four grounded in reality novels and had adopted the horror genre evidently raising flags to those familiar with king's usual work being the fanatic that brown was and now suspicious of the richard bachman name brown went to the library of congress where he found king's name registered to batman's first release that being rage now fully convinced

of his suspicions brown wrote to kirby mccauley king's agent stating what he had found yet without any intention of exposing his findings to the public it was more of a way to let them know he knew and had irrefutable evidence however the bachmann story was at this point becoming unravelled anyway with multiple questionings by journalists to the new american library over the authenticity of the author's existence it was a shame bachmann's life had to be cut so short as king himself felt as if his original purpose other than the issue with oversaturating the market which

was to answer the question of whether people were buying king's books for his talent or name was never really answered and so with the house of cards beginning to wobble and likely to fall any time soon king rung brown's workplace opening up the conversation by saying steve brown this is steve king okay you know i'm backman i know i'm backman what we going to do about it let's talk over the course of the phone call the two began chatting and after a while king began suggesting he'd give brown an interview that he could use in

order to write up an article about the story of the bachmann sudanese and how he was the one to uncover the truth brown obviously agreed to the idea and the article was published in the washington post on april 9 1985. the title read stephen king shining through and it began with the lines novelist richard bachmann died of exposure earlier this year and i helped kill him [Music] you