You Gotta Walk Before You Can Run (The Running Man, 1982)

The Running Man (1982)

The greatest action movie never made.*

* The 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger dooftacular resembles the book as much as Goofy resembles a...dog? But we'll enjoy the joyful, gap-toothed idiocy in screenshots, anyway, because it was a fun sort of stupid and worthy, at least, of a little representation here.

"Don't go for second best, baby, put your love to the test
You know you know you've got to make him express how he feels
And maybe then you'll know your love is real..."
("Express Yourself," Madonna, 1989,
and don't tell me that video wasn't inspired by this and...)

...most especially THAT--The Carrying Man-- aka Arnold, poppin'
muscles and facial hair down at the factory.

I am going to step out of the self-imposed SK Read-a-Thon Spectacular timeline because I had my hands on The Bachman Books (1985) and was not about to squander an opportunity to read the rest of it. Unfortunately, I had to turn it back in to the library before I read the entire thing, skipping poor ol' Roadwork in the process, but I was determined to get the other two down for what will be very obvious reasons. Sorry (again), Roadwork. I may get back around to you again depending on availability and my wavering drive to try.

THE VACATIONING MAN

Get to da choppahhh!

Ben Richards won't be getting any sugar during The Running Man.

First, I like The Long Walk (1979) and The Running Man best, primarily because I've been a sucker for dystopian angst since the Cold War was all the rage. In fact, from the first time I read it to this very last, The Running Man has been my favorite of all the "Bachman" (nee King) pseudonym penned works. It's a runaway train on a downhill slope and it drives hard, ruthless, and full throttle to the very end. It is a page ripping, heart-pounding joy to read. I consider myself very lucky to have read The Running Man years before the movie came out. King's story is gritty, breathless, and unvarnished. His projection of a world not fifty years into the future is shocking but not unbelievable. It is filthy, low, and without hope. The rivers are teeming with toxins and the air is thick with poison. People aren't just poor, they are a starving, desperate, wretched poor. Crime is commonplace and kindergartners are selling drugs and kicking guys on crutches in the streets. It is grim on top of grime with a side of asthma.

The Sitting Man.

The Long Walk and The Running Man are thematically connected on several different levels. They both take place in the dystopian near-future where people bet their lives to win long-shot riches beyond imagination. The Long Walk, sort of a proto-Hunger Games where teen boys need only outwalk ninety-nine fellow competitors to win The Prize (anything you want for the rest of your life), is the less gritty yet still just as morally debased of the two, and is set out in the Maine countryside with contestants from all walks (ahem) of life. Amidst the harrowing exhaustion and bland bloodshed, boys remain boys, jokes are bantered, and friendships are formed. On the flipside, The Running Man is set in primarily urban, impoverished areas, with the main protagonist a desperate, hungry, angry Everyman who chooses to sacrifice his life to save his child and give her a better future. His bonds with others, as tenuous and brief as they are, are scattershot, painful, and marked by unfathomable suffering. While the characters of both works live in worlds rampant with pollution in countries run by authoritarian, militaristic governments, they are driven to these extreme competitions for very different reasons.

Showtime!

As heartless as the world in The Long Walk might be, the twisted sacrifice of a hundred young men once a year is ultimately by choice--it is considered a great honor and the kids must test to even be considered. While The Prize is at least theoretically coveted, a great number of the participants chose to be there for the perceived privilege, for the singular competition, and sometimes for reasons too complex for their young minds to comprehend, especially once the race grows harder and the consequences of bowing out turn from theoretical to literal.

The dancers are seriously the most 80s thing to ever 80s.

In The Running Man, the world is a much darker place, all kinds of ugly, scabbed, and mean. The contestants of the various shows run by the Games Network know exactly why they are there: Money. The United States is a far more fractured place, wrought with pollution and extreme poverty, run by an authoritarian government in tandem with the all-powerful Games Federation. The divide between the Haves and the Have-Nots is cavernous and largely unbreachable. The only bridges across the chasm are slim, rickety, and go by names like Treadmill for Bucks, Dig Your Grave, and, of course, The Running Man. These bridges are rigged, deadly, and the last hope of those that would dare to traverse them.

These close-ups are meant to showcase the bitchen,
glittery leotards and nothing else.

The most unnerving yet spot-on connection between these two Bachman tales is the living, breathing monstrosity that is "the Crowd." Each novel's main event is followed reverently and obsessively by the riotous, impetuous, fervent, ravenous carnival of the Crowd...an unblinking audience of voyeurs, vapid onlookers, a reeling, shrieking wall of clutching Attention. In The Long Walk, the circus atmosphere is more apt, with celebratory signs, banners, confetti, and well-meaning (though highly illegal) interference, with one man chucking watermelon slices at the exhausted walkers much to the crowd's delight (and the walkers' relief). Even in the cacophony of cheering hoards in the cities and towns, or smiling kids camping out in the country just to see the walkers trudge by, there are also moments of grim analytics (the walkers overhear plenty of wagering on which boy will fall next) and the cold application of punishment. Walkers don't just get to tap out and take a nap of failure in the back seat of dad's car on the way back to Walla Walla. Once their time is up (120 seconds), their time is really up. Slowing down or stopping at least get warnings; more serious infractions mean instant death. And the crowd, while avid to the point of hysteria, clearly understands that the rules work both ways. Walkers can't run into the crowd (they still try) and the crowd can't run into the road, specifically anywhere near the walkers. When a little dog skitters out onto the highway, yapping its simple little head off, the soldiers blow it away just as nonchalant as you please. A crying boy is left dogless, sure, but it's a mean old world, anyway.

The Opiate of the Masses.

The Crowd in The Running Man is less carnival, more carnivorous. Part of the game requires whipping the audience into a frenzy of bloodlust, smearing the character of the contestant and his family, and triggering the most primal fears of "good citizens." While the game employs hunters to track down and take down the running man, the audience is incentivized to participate. There's money for confirmed sightings, but there's big money and a heap of fame if an audience member manages to kill the contestant. The Crowd is a weapon of the Games Authority and the State and the bloodier and more spectacular the violence in the chase, the better.

King understands a Crowd. He is a devoted student to its nastiest behaviors and stupidest convictions. Much like the heaving, groaning congregants amassed to raise hands and speak tongues for Jesus, he understands that we all need a little proselytizing to get by, we all need some Good Time Religion to believe in, even if it's bank notes over bibles, or Orange Julius Caesar over crucified Jesus Christ. Hell, I used to hate Twitter, found it too cacophonous and chaotic to get into, but have taken to checking it every day since the election in 2016 just to read the latest "sick burns" delivered by silverest tongues on "my" side of the aisle. Sometimes they go too far. Sometimes I find it hard to care. It's a manufactured balm on my own burns. Fuck those guys (TM), brought to you by Unguentine. This is deep in the bone, the chattering, murmuring, shrieking wave of the Crowd.

As time in this real world progressed, some of King's futurstic gimmicks and gadgets grew less futuristic and more nifty "for the time," and many things still commonplace even in King's imaginings (party lines and phone booths, for example) have long gone the way of the dinosaur. But I still shudder at how close he got to the Truth of things where it really, really counted. Air cars be danged, we literally have Free-Vees in our houses...and not just one but several, and they come in all shapes and sizes, from the mega flatscreen in your living room to the laptop I'm using to write this blog entry. Instead of watching a single channel of propaganda we have a whole slew of channels to choose from, many of which spew whatever propaganda you and your like-minded friends and family are most likely to feel best about, lean into, and fall calmly asleep against in the soft assurance that you are, in fact, on the right side of history. Worse yet, it isn't even free. At least in King's dystopian future, people had no choice. Free-Vee was government mandated. We pay for the equipment (tvs, computers, phones), the electricity to run it, and every "entertainment package" imaginable to get as much of the Vee-Sans-Free as we can consume. Hog heaven and a buffet full of bullshit.

One of the departures from the book is Killian. Here, he's the host (and
founder) of The Running Man. In the book, Bobby Thompson is the host
while Killian (Dan, not Damon) is the executive producer. 

Maria Conchita Alonso searches for change in her futuristic triangle purse
while the futuristic glow of neon pulses in the background.

When Survivor premiered in May of 2000 my very first thought was "OH SHIT, RUNNING MAN." Sure, no one was going to die while participating on Survivor, but things were going to get ethically murky and people were going to get hurt. And they have. There are always bug bites and hunger. Some of the contestants get rib-jutting skinny. They look dirty, tired, and quite a few start fragmenting mentally. Real injuries have occurred. I only watched the first couple of seasons, mostly because it was such a titanic force in the pop culture ethos, but also because I wanted to see the drama, the car crash, the train wreck. Everyone talked about the show. After The Real World, Survivor was a catalyst in reality television programming. What was once cable-only and kind of slimy had gone mainstream and primetime. I had to stop watching after a while. The premise of suffering on a deserted island while playing ridiculous games against another hungry, angry, sleep-deprived team did not appeal to me. Watching people waste away while bickering over meager supplies became just too gruesome to bear.

"YOU." Arnold sees Maria for the first time since she ruined their vacation.

There are limits to the game shows of the real and now, but what hungers can't be sated from watching survivors starve can be refreshed on the next channel with police pursuits, fail video montages, and reruns of Forensic Files. And if the immense catalog of real or fictionalized televised entertainment does not delve deep enough into the sick marrow of inhumanity? Fire up the computer and use whatever search engine you choose to find real, live car crash investigation photos, celebrity autopsies, beheading videos. We may not have The Running Man, but we have a million little alternate outlets for whatever depths of depravity we might seek to reach. So far, there is no bottom.

In all The Running Man's manufactured vilification of its contestants, the lies, retouched photographs, and poverty based fear mongering, it's still somehow not as creeping loathsome as so much of the easily accessible media today. The Running Man, for all it's grotesque misery and empty despair, is almost quaint.

Severe shoulder pads on beige women = Future Forward.

Maybe it's the lies that have salted the pot so slowly and steadily over the years that we've collectively been brined into thick, dulled deadheads with no sense of the parameters of decency outside of whatever works for us in the moment. It is easy enough to gather around a television set alongside fellow humans to watch and rewatch the aerial view of a white Ford Bronco racing down a busy highway interspersed with footage of a walkway smeared in blood. Worse, I remember believing just about everything my government told me when I was growing up, regardless of whatever party was largely in charge at the time. If the news said it, it had to be true. You might say I was ignorant and naive...and you would not be wrong. It is also just a part of my personality, one flimsy gate made of duct tape and popsicle sticks that persists to exist even to this day. I'm learning, though, and it's been just horrible, akin to a sizzling, screaming exorcism of goodwill and dopey, smiling handshakes, but I'm girded at least against anything politician-related. I do remain, as always, vulnerable on an interpersonal level. I believe people are forthcoming, honest, and well-meaning. As empathetic as I imagine myself to be, I struggle to believe that a person standing in front of me, smiling and seemingly friendly, could have any other agenda than friendship and openheartedness. I know, right? Like fish in a barrel, I am.

This is the closest Schwarzenegger gets to the Real Ben Richards.

"Here, use my back, victim."

But people don't always mean well, and governments mean about as well as they are required to while still milking as much money and power as they can under the flimsy guise of "service." In the novel and the movie adaptation of The Running Man, Ben Richards kidnaps an upper-class woman (at vastly different stages and reasons because the book and the movie are only vaguely similar) who also believes everything the government tells her. Until the truth shines its ugly yellow light on how things are really done. In the movie, the Free-Vee programming is meant to numb the legions of the poor with flashy violence while feeding the bourgeois bloodlust against "criminal elements," most of which are poor and/or revolutionaries who would upend the status quo. There is a suggestion that if you just tell people the truth, they will rise up together, proletariat and bourgeoisie hand-in-hand praise Jesus, and crush the authoritarian powers of the Games Federation and the government to (perhaps) create a better world. Adorable, but stupid.

Sure, bitch.

Here's your pen. (Look at Sven's expression.)

In the book, the people living in poverty already know the score. They watch the Free-Vee or don't watch the Free-Vee, but they know exactly what they are and how little power they have. Contestants on all of the games are citizens, not criminals, but are painted in an ugly enough light to root against, anyway, not that it takes much for the upper class folks to root against the dirty destitute. It is easy to hate what you fear, even if it isn't the person at all but the poverty they wear like a stinking crevice of government cheese flab with a rheumy cough.

This face. Almost as good as the original ending in the book.

The most gripping part of this read through was, by far, Ben Richards himself. I remembered each plot point as I read, but the rage he feels was so much more visceral this time around. I do not live in poverty, I do not go hungry, and I can breathe just fine most of the time, but I still understood that rage so much better than I ever had before. It isn't about one man, one party, one government, one country. If only. It's more about that insidious flora of lies, all the intertwining roots, hardy, healthy trunks, the shiny, greasy leaves, and all that heady, smoking haze of pollen, treacherous and sticky. The most comfortable are happy to believe whatever serves their own interests, everyone else be damned. Somehow millions of people living in poverty are convinced to work against their own interests to fatten cats already too fat to scat. Remember those Twitter tricksies I mentioned earlier? They fuck up, too, and more often than I can understand, because everything is reactionary now, minute to minute: the fastest condemnations, declarations, and witty decimations get the most likes. It's infuriating. I'm comfortable, I'm fed, I have everything I need and want, but that Ben Richards rage, man, it's too real, too present, too Now.

BLUE STEEL MAN.

This is why, now more than ever, I am absolutely screaming for someone to please, please make this film. The real Running Man, the gritty, dirty, mean, hateful, angry, true Running Man. They could even keep it set in 2025 just like the book (the movie changed it to 2017, exactly 30 years from its release, which is funny because few movies look as bracingly and ridiculously 1980s as The Running Man). It could be a truly epic movie, something both action packed and moving, with little tweaks here and there, of course. Just after 9/11, I would have agreed that the ending would have to be changed. It's still tricky, but not impossible (or even groundbreaking, there have been several movies and shows that have depicted that very thing since to differing negative audience response). A new depiction of The Running Man could be a smeared, cracked mirror of the near-future Now. Audiences would definitely relate.

Tunnel of Death!
In the book Ben Richards just takes the elevator down to the street.

Do I hate the 1987 movie version of The Running Man? Nah. They are dissimilar enough, first of all, that it's almost more of an homage than a adaptation. In fact, it is more of an extremely silly, extremely campy Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle than it is an action movie based on a Stephen King work.

And I may have had other reasons for not hating it so much. Context always matters...

Deeeaaaaathhhhhh!

In 1988, I had my first summer job, a real moneymaker, too, because it was summer custodial for the school district, which paid well above minimum wage. I worked 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday in the smothering heat of un-airconditioned junior highs, swabbing out lockers, dusting shelves, spraying out metal trashcans, and for one truly blissful week, scraping decades of floor wax buildup from around the perimeter of the entire cafeteria. Gro. Dee.

With my first paycheck, I bought an NES and Super Mario Brothers. With my second paycheck, I bought a VCR, our family's very first. I'd coveted one since spending hours taping and rewatching Mtv videos and cable movies on my best friend's Betamax, even going so far as watching all of Poltergeist on backwards play. I was a high school kid with a mild video game addiction and a major movie fixation. I was obsessed.

Best friends! In the movie, Arnie's pro-revolution, jail break buddies are
rounded up and sent into the arena with him, later to be joined by Maria
Conchita Alonso. In the book, Richards gets help from various people
along the way, but only meets the other contestants at the end of the
interview cycle, only one of which is similarly named to a character in
the movie (Laughlin). In the book, Laughlin is caught and slain by two
little kids in Topeka, Kansas.

Soon enough, we were hooked on taping movies and comedy specials off of HBO on our new VCR...Spaceballs, Splash, Aliens, The Lost Boys, everything...including The Running Man. I was the right age to enjoy some slapstick gore and pithy one-liners, but truth be told it was kind of a hard sell. Even in 1987, The Running Man was a very ridiculous movie. Plus I knew the truth of the story and how little it jived with the film. It made serious stuff into something worse than a joke. A high-haired girl could get righteously mad and stompy about it. Except...

It also had Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was important. I may or may not have had a Massive Crush on said Schwarzenegger. I may or may not have had the only damn poster anybody carried of said Schwarzenegger up on my wall, a gross, camo-makeup smeared, gun toting promotional poster from dorky Predator. I may or may not have watched The Running Man just to see said Schwarzenegger in his lil yellow track suit or, better yet, that Nice White T when he benchpresses Maria Conchita Alonso. Who can say.

Grow lights in the arena.

Most of it was sufferable enough to watch while existing in the 80s (the jazzerdancers, the neon, the big hair) but even then the acting is just terrible--terrible--and there are few things worse than Mick Fleetwood the earnest revolutionary acting against Arnie the muscle puppet. Well, one thing was worse. In the movie, Richard Dawson (acting exactly how we imagined Richard Dawson to act after the Family Feud cameras turned off and all the kisses were dispensed) introduces the contestants, makes the audience hate them, then sends them down this silly chute to a sort of arena (earthquake ruins of the city). There they are hunted by "stalkers" who are basically just campy superhero characters from some rebate comic in Hell. They go by names that describe their particular talents, like Buzzsaw, Subzero, and the absolute worst, Dynamo, a dipshit, rapist, cartoon of an asshole in an ELO charioteer, plastic suit-of-armor who lip syncs opera and electrocutes people from afar. What. An Asshole. In, like, every way. It's so campy you start to slide down in your seat and end up on the floor with popcorn debris.

Sure, why not.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is not Ben Richards. In the book, Richards is described as "a man in baggy gray pants and a cheap bowl haircut and sunken eyes." He lives on a diet of "greasy pizza wedges and government pill-commodities." He is not anyone remotely related to Mr. Universe. Of course the image of that hideous bowl cut really stuck in my craw when I read the book in the 80s (and quite frankly still irritates, like why) so my brain adapted a different appearance to make the hero more palatable. Ironically (or not), I always imagined Michael Biehn would make a fine Ben Richards. Yes, Arnold's pesky little rat of a Sarah Connor savior, Mr. "Cyborgs Don't Feel Pain I Do," and all around furrowed-brow-troubled-by-these-developments Everyman who later played the much loved Hicks in Aliens. He was skinny enough, for sure, but also normal-handsome and able to convey all sorts of tortured inner feelings about whatever bad thing was going on in makebelieve land, be it mean-mouthed cyborgs or skittering, chompy xenomorphs.

The Concerned Man. 

A modern take on The Running Man would require it's own vision of Ben Richards, but there would be no restrictions on the scope of the story. No more relegating the action to one sequestered section of Los Angeles. In the book, Richards starts out in Co-Op city, and suburban blight across the river from the fictional Midwestern city of Harding, the base of operations for the Games Network. His run takes him to New York City, Boston, Manchester (NH), and Portland (ME) eventually ending up back in Harding, however briefly, at the conclusion of the chase. There are moments of creeping terror, blind panic, massive explosions, car chases, and a slow motion kidnapping so close to the edge of disaster from start to finish that the reader barely breathes until the very end of it.

Frankly, the book could never have been accurately depicted in 1987...probably not even 1997. We were still so deep in the pocket of paranoia and blind nationalism from the Cold War to buy into the ugly truths laid out in King's story. Not even one projected as far into the future as we could stand to imagine--thirty short years--and even then it was a candy-coated, high-minded, Good Always Wins clown college of slapstick murder and flat one-liners. We deserve a real, full-tilt, no-holds-barred update of The Running Man. Something that let's off steam and let's us all collectively rage against the machine, even if it's only vicariously.

Grade: A
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 6, not scary so much as intense. The depiction of rampant, lethal pollution is scarier now than it was 30+ years ago, that's for damn sure.
Warnings: Casual and virulent bigotry and racism, Real Rage, despair, and some truly fantastic GORE that will freak you out for a lifetime (guaranteed).
Artifact: See, Rage. Thanks, Wichita Public Library!

Note: All screenshots were taken from this HD trailer and this hilarious part of the movie with the dancers and the pen. Thanks to these YouTube heroes for sharing the weirdness that is ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER'S the running man.

Owning Your Shit in the Age of Spin (Rage, 1977)

RAGE (1977)

After the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, Stephen King sat down and wrote an essay about violence in America titled "Guns." In the essay, King addressed his decision to let the book Rage go out of print. Rage, originally titled Getting It On, is a particularly significant piece of the bestselling author's oeuvre since King himself has identified it as the first novel he ever wrote. The fact that King wrote the story of a high school shooter while he himself was a junior and senior in high school only solidifies the incredible value of the work [1]. King's insights and perspective from the direct point of view of a high school kid lends a level of authenticity that is clear, honest, and blunt. Rage, before it is even considered as a piece of literature to be enjoyed or reviled, already stands as something to be studied, discussed, and protected.

Scary skull concept. Are you scared? It fits,
though I'd argue most directly to just one of
the novels within: The Long Walk. I could
swear my edition had much sharper cover
art and CMYK color processing, but I can't
be 100% certain. It kind of looks like they
scanned in a copy of the original and this
is what came out, like something from a
1985 Xerox machine. 

In the essay "Guns," King mentions rewriting Getting It On some ten years after that first draft and sending it to his publisher to print under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, "[w]here it was published as Rage, sold a few thousand copies, and disappeared from view" [2]. This is a bit of an oversimplification of the matter, since most King fans back in those grody days of the 80s remember when King's pseudonym was discovered and, more precisely, when King's publisher was kind enough to release most of the Bachman works (sans Thinner) under one title, The Bachman Books. I had my paperback copy for decades, spine cracked, pages yellowed and torn, before surrendering it to a giveaway pile, never considering the fact that it was, as of the late nineties, incrementally but increasingly irreplaceable. Because after a series of school shootings linked directly or indirectly to Rage, King decided he'd had enough and asked the publisher to let it go out of print [3].

If you look it up, you can still find plenty of copies of either Rage or The Bachman Books for sale, almost all of them used (and any purporting to be new, buyer beware). The new, "international edition" of The Bachman Books sold on Amazon has taken a few hits to its star rating over the years since the original description included Rage even though the book itself (yet another 2012 edition) does not. They've updated the description since, but the pissed off reviews still stand. People want Rage, more likely than not because it completes the works of Stephen King. And no one likes being told they've been shut out of a special club where only a special few get to know the secret handshake. I don't know, maybe they should've jammed Thinner in there as a consolation prize.

While I can see how perceptive, well-read
fans caught on to the ruse, I would still insist
that the Bachman books do feel different.
They're grittier, somehow. Meaner.

You can't unring a bell...and you can't unshoot a gun. King describes his decision to let Rage go out of print as something he did with "real regret." While he does not believe the story was the singular cause of any one of the violent incidents connected to it, he considers Rage "a possible accelerant" [4]. Which was all the reasoning he needed. From any genuinely compassionate perspective, it is completely understandable. 

Since learning of his decision to let Rage go out of print (which took years for me to truly understand--I was a bit out of it for a long while), I've experienced a surplus of supportive, combative, compassionate, and mean spirited feelings about it. As with any King work that I absolutely adored in my teen years, It's Complicated. At this writing I'm balanced on slim blade, where two opposing arguments weigh exactly the same...and (at least in the exact here and now) I'm not sweating it so much because of one very awesome reason (more on that in a minute).

On one side, I understand where King is coming from. Anyone who has read more than one of his books knows that he's an empathetic person, someone who can create whole, true humans out of thin air full of depth, history, and feeling. And anyone who has read his chatty forewords, afterwords, and varied addenda are doubly tuned in to King's self awareness, sensitivity, and genuine affection for his fans. The criminal incidents that can be connected to Rage started with hostage taking and ended in multiple murders. Even the most incidental connection between the least damaging act of violence and something I wrote would absolutely sting like hell. I would feel sick and struggle for perspective. It would hurt. So I get it. After the killings in Paducah, Kentucky, King called it. He couldn't bear the association any longer and, more importantly, he didn't have to. 

On the other side, the place where I tend to linger, is the question of censorship. Until the last copy of Rage or The Bachman Books perishes from earth, I suppose you could never exactly call the decision to take this one particular King story out of publication "censorship," but Never. The. Less. Access to Rage is effectively restricted. You can try to buy it online, but you're rolling the dice whenever you buy something used sight unseen. You could attempt to find a copy in a used bookstore, and maybe you will get lucky. And your library might be hoarding a copy like a bright and gleaming Precious, back in storage, not out in the stacks where any idjit bastage could just up and steal it. There are tepid little pools everywhere, no doubt, but the fresh spigot to Rage has been cut off.

Savage secrets, ghoulish game shows, and em-dash abuse, oh my

Rage speaks to a certain teenage mindset, one twisted to seek validation through violence and chaos, but it also speaks to a lot of other teenage mindsets, and plenty of empathetic adults, too. Rage should be available for study--for academics interested in King's early, formative work, his very first novel is, quite frankly, extremely vital. And yes, for history, as well. It's just one fragment to the exhaustive school/youth shooter formula that we're still trying to solve to this day, but it's important that historians, sociologists, educators, psychologists, and politicians get every fact they can to try to understand this problem better. This includes access to the novel Rage--and not just a synopsis, either.

There are sales/ad pages aplenty in
this edition of The Bachman Books.
This one appears in the frontmatter.
Shameless! I do love that Fangoria-
style font, though.

Leaving Rage out of print is not exactly censorship, but it's got its lips pressed against it and the glass between the reader and the work is getting all kinds of fogged up. It's censorship adjacent and I Don't Fucking Like It.

How do I balance on this impossible edge, both sympathetic and disapproving? In the best way, of course, because revisiting this King classic comes with a sunshine-y side story, and it's time to glow and crow about the Wichita Public Library. Let's talk those bitches UP. Because after realizing what I'd done (goodbye my copy of The Bachman Books, I hope someone is loving you), I had to come to terms with the fact that I might not be able to get my hands on a complete copy at all. I searched the Wichita Public Library's website and found that they did, indeed, have one paperback copy. It even listed Rage in the description. More intriguingly yet, it was in the "Storage Collection" and the shelf location was "Ask for Staff Assistance." It was also checked out at the time, so I put a request in and warned myself not to get my hopes up. After all, there were versions of The Bachman Books out there being advertised as intact that were, in fact, not intact, sending customers into their own mini-rages over false advertising and general vexation about not being able to get the thing they wanted. 

Full title page. Obligatory "Explain
yourself" section included. Anyone
who thinks the Bachman books are
just throwaways that should have
stayed in the trunk are just dead wrong.
Wait til you hear all of my Strong and
Loud feelings about The Running Man.

The good old Wichita Public Library came through, though, didn't she? The best part yet, it appears to be the same edition I owned as a kid. I'm not 100% certain it is the exact same since there are weird little differences in the color values on the cover and there's some wackadoodle typesetting in the interior, but it's the same cover design, same interior content, and was published roughly around the same time my own copy was clutched in my sweaty little hands, at the twee age of 14, still smarting from my time in the clink, aka middle school. The library's copy has a creased back cover and some pages that are a little beat up, but the binding is remarkably strong and, aside from just age, it is in fantastic condition. When I first picked it up, I rifled through to see if Rage was really there, and was squawked with joy to find it complete and whole. A real copy of The Bachman Books in my hand! And all courtesy of the Wichita Public Library. Fucking heroic. 

So that's what's got me balanced here, half compassion, half rrrrage against even the hint of censorship, because librarians Know What's UP. Somebody was fully aware that Rage was out of print and would be harder for the general reader to get a hold of. Not impossible, but harder. So they secured a copy and then double secured it by keeping it safe but available to any patron that requested it. I only had to have a library card in good standing to check it out and take it home. No surrendering of kidneys or first born boychildren required. It's even renewable so long as no one else requests it. Fucking. Heroic.

I would just like to state for the record, before moving on, that I know I've related stories here about my tendency to break book backs, fold pages, and all around act a damn ingrate when it comes to the treatment of my own books, but rest assured I treat library books with the utmost care, always. I've been especially sensitive to this copy of The Bachman Books because I know how much it is worth. So, no sweating WPL. I promise not to crack any spines.

Copyright page, jammed tight from top to
bottom. The bottom margins in this book
are obscene. Like, who dares? Apparently,
Signet, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a
division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

Growing up, The Bachman Books was always a favorite, placed much higher than the pulpy horror King frolicked in during the early-to-mid 80s (Firestarter, Cujo, Christine, etc) at least in my estimation, with three of the stories (sorry Roadwork) true rippers and roarers, fearless, bold, brutal, striking, and even in the depths of speculative, near-future fantasy, so very real. As a bruised survivor of hellschool, I found high school to be a far milder, much more pleasant place to score those C's and B's, but when I first read Rage I still remembered with cruel clarity the stifling victimhood of the bullied. Middle school, high school--it all translated. 

In the essay "Guns," King spends a little time outlining the every day circumstances of the kids who carried out those Rage-adjacent incidents; what happened during each incident, certain things uttered during or after, and what was going on in their lives just prior to acting out. In each case, there are sad moments of attention seeking--blustering, infantile, pathetic neediness--and declarations like, "I don't think I can kill anyone....I don't think I can do it," "Why am I doing this?" and "Kill me! Please! I can't believe I did that!" [5] In each case, the kid was under some sort of external duress, whether it was guardian neglect or abuse, or bullying from schoolmates. This theme isn't new--it's basically the same refrain we've heard after every school shooting. The difference, however, may be in how these particular kids reacted to their own actions. Why am I doing this? I can't believe I did that. What have I done?

It is real! It is complete! Thank you, Wichita
Public Library! As much as I believe readers
deserve full access to Rage, it is actually not
my favorite novel in the collection. It's not
even my second favorite. Still good, though.
Still worth fighting for.

Reading Rage now, under the shadow of its quiet death, forces the reader to think not only of the story unfolding, but of the context outside the story; its earnest beginnings (King laboring away at his typewriter, smudged glasses and pimple-faced, bent over the keys and typing a wild whir because he's got Something To Say), and the dark, sad demise (sullied by association to the despair of its creator and sent silently out to sea). Considering the notoriety, you'd expect to find a much bigger bloodbath within its pages, kids bodies sprawled in gore, a grinning psychopath with a gun. But it's really more like The Breakfast Club with a pistol. There is a body count, but the construct is deliberate and the message is clear: Charlie Decker doesn't shoot his teacher because he's a stone cold killer out for blood; he shoots her because he's got a stomach ache. And why does Charlie have a stomach ache? Because he has a controlling, distant, judgmental dickwad of a father. Because he has severe anxiety and has been trying to manage it on his own to no avail. Because he's starting to lose cohesion, grow more paranoid, and has nowhere to go but to his bedroom, day after day, to quietly crack up. Because when his teachers put him on display, trembling at the chalkboard, mocking his ignorance, slathering sarcasm and snotty shots at his back while he tries to work it out, stomach turning and churning, mind whirring, until finally its just one shot too many...well. Chaos. 

I love the early author pages for King--they get
more and more effusive and it's literally still the
tip of the iceberg with this guy. So much more TK.

The story begins during an interim period where the lead character, Charlie Decker, attends classes while awaiting his fate. Weeks earlier, Charlie brained his science teacher with a wrench after an unfortunate chalkboard showdown. The teacher was severely hurt, but lived. After counseling, meetings with police, lawyers, administrators, and psychologists, it's decided Charlie can return to school for a period while they decide if he's going to finish high school where he started...or end up at the reform school. But it's already too late for all that, really, because the teachers keep sniping, and now his paranoia is validated by actual stares and whispers, so when Charlie is finally summoned to the principal's office to be told his future, Charlie is already spring loaded to snap. All it takes is one more mealy mouthed lecture from a condescending adult and Charlie commences with what he calls "getting it on." There's a scene in the principal's office, followed by a locker set on fire, and finally Charlie rejoins his math class, blowing away the teacher and taking the students hostage. When another teacher comes along to tell them to evacuate because the fire alarms are now blaring, the teacher is given a chance to escape yet can't seem to grasp the situation--to listen to the students' warnings to leave--and gets shot as well.

When I was a senior in high school, I went through a very mild but memorable incident with the principal's office that immediately made me think of Rage at the time, not because I went off and acted out or anything, but because it reminded me so much of the administrators and teachers, and really most of the adults, in King's story. As King illustrates again and again, adults don't listen. Ever. They just make sarcastic remarks, nag, sermonize, finger wag, judge, humiliate, undermine...they "grind you down" as Pig Pen, one of Charlie's hostages in Rage, would say. They never, ever listen. This little incident of mine had to do with tardiness. I was late to school because I was doing something for my mother, by her direction and permission. The principal's office was deliberately obtuse about the whole thing, rules are rules, etc., and they were hellbent on giving me detention. The condescension was thick, bull-headed, and entirely unnecessary. They ended up reversing their decision, but not before extracting a good deal of frustration and anxiety out of me, the sickly-sweet nectar of the petty dictatorship, and only after my mother called and raked them hard over the coals. There was no satisfaction in that, either, none at all. I remember sitting in the library and stewing over it, mulling and mad, and thinking of Rage, the deliberate, obtuse bullshit of grownups. Being seventeen, the exact same age as Charlie in the book, and so close to finally being out from under that giant, collective grownup thumb, made such a small incident even more bitter and frustrating. The condescension, so close to emancipation, was unbearable. 

Backmatter ad/sales page updated sometime after
the first printing of this Signet edition. Gerald's
Game, Needful Things, and The Wastelands were
all published in the early 90s, several others listed
were published after 1986 when this paperback
first went to print. Funny the things they go out
of their way to update...and the things they don't.

After Charlie kills "the grownups," silencing their dismissive derision and flippant disregard (and all subsequent grownup interactions over the intercom are threatening, confrontational, and table-turning lashings), the class becomes a sort of confessional, where kids share like stories, moments of pain and embarrassment, secrets never told to anyone until now. Stitched deep through it all is the insipid violence of artifice and the conspiracy of "Society" (the grownups) to make kids behave a certain way, believe a certain way, conform as directed and submit to be ground down, sometimes all the way down, until you are a walking stomach ache with a gun. In some way or another, everyone in the class participates, engages, relates...everyone except all-American Ted, who becomes more and more enraged as the hours tick by. Ted likes the clean artifice, despises the dirty real, and hates Charlie most of all for setting this ugly little Breakfast Club in motion. Eventually the class really isn't hostage anymore and Charlie facilitates a final act of chaos, one last bit of education where the class teaches Ted a lesson.

Spoiler alert from 1977, but Ted lives. He's not doing great afterward, at all, but all the violence done to him is not by Charlie's hand, at least not directly. It stands to reason that someone built entirely of ersatz could never bear so much blinding reality. The heat--and his classmates ruthless hands--melt poor Ted down to a drooling nub. Charlie goes to the mental hospital, the rest of the class graduates and moves on. Are they better people for it? Worse? Was one morning stripped of pretense enough to build a lifetime of honest living? The story never tells. But I think about those boys out here in the real world, those stupid, sad boys and their daddy's guns, reading Rage and Getting Ideas. Why am I doing this? I can't believe I did that...

Like, they seriously went bonkers with the ad pages in this book. Buy! Buy!
Buy! But this is how you hustled before the internet was a thing.

Rage isn't a free-for-all of gun toting vengeance. The murders are almost perfunctory. The story is more about the conversation, the connection, kids across different social groups coming together to engage in real talk, down to the grit and the ugly, and coming out the other side still alive, and  accepted. Don't you think those real world sad boys read Rage and felt a sort of painful keening, a desire to be heard and understood, to be accepted, validated? I do.

See? What tomfoolery is this. I mean, they're advertising a book
that the reader is literally holding. 

Compared to other "teen shooter" or "school shooter" works in King's oeuvre, Rage is actually quite tame. I found "Cain Rose Up," a short story included in the Skeleton Crew collection, to be far more disturbing. Charlie Decker does terrible things, but he's impossible to hate--his anxiety is relatable, he's funny, insightful, and has a bright inner world that might've grown an entirely different way under the guidance of a better father. Curt Garrish, the main character in "Cain Rose Up," is cored out, keyed up, and ugly deep into the bone. His most banal thoughts are peppered with images and inclinations of violence, murder, decay, and complete, unhinged sickness. Garrish has a nasty  thought for every person he encounters and his redemption arc is a flat line. He is a far more suitable "hero" to the modern mass shooter, school or otherwise. He's a shell for want of a chamber.

Worse yet, there's Todd Bowden from Apt Pupil, a novella in the Different Seasons collection. Through a shockingly devious act of extortion, young Todd basically procures a pet Nazi in hiding, and forces the man to regale him with stories of the war with all the gory details, a quid pro quo that grows more and more depraved as time goes on. Bowden is a budding Nazi of a sort, though he is not so much concerned with racial purity or ethnic cleansing so much as he is attracted to acts of torture and murder. Through a series of events, secrets are unearthed, and the boy, now a teen, is cornered by his own lies and subversion, and the story ends with all-American Todd Bowden sniping cars on the highway until the cops finally take him out.

Bowden is another, much likelier idol for modern shooters to emulate. A baby Nazi with a depraved inner world almost entirely devoid of healthy thoughts or any sense of goodness. Garrish and Bowden are examples of the grotesque, the thing no one really wants to talk about, something so familiar in the pimple-faced killers who committed their crimes after all iterations of Rage went out of print and, apparently, out of vogue with more modern teen psychopaths. More often than not, we witness--time and time again--an unapologetic, vengeful, irredeemable murderer. The last crime "connected" to Rage--the final straw for King--happened in 1997, two years before the incident that is widely considered to be the beginning of the "modern age" of dead-eyed shooters: Columbine. When incidents of school violence became less a cry for help and more about the body count.

The very last page of the book is this public
service announcement that would be sad if
it wasn't so close to the truth. We don't have
a literacy problem so much as we have, er,
a reading comprehension problem...or an
"easily succumbs to propaganda" problem...
or a severe addiction to conspiracy
theories problem...take your pick.
There are so many.

There were dead-eyed killers before, just as there remain regretful killers now, but the scales seemed to have dipped heavy on the flat-eyed, pinch-mouthed sinews of unchecked misanthropy. The influence of a 24-hour news cycle, the immediacy of the internet, and our constant connectedness have all played a part in the evolution of the school shooter. The education system gets its slice. The parents of these killers own a large share of the responsibility, banal hardships and best intentions be damned. Except in egregious cases, I would not hold a parent of a teen shooter criminally responsible for their child's actions, but I do believe wholeheartedly in Owning Your Shit. The stories of mass shooters so often follow the same, frustrating narrative, where at some point it was clear that the future murderer was in psychological crisis and the people closest to the situation just let it ride and hoped for the best. No matter the circumstances, if your child is in crisis, you are responsible for getting that child the help that he needs. A broken arm gets set and placed in a cast. A cancer stricken body gets radiation and/or chemo. A fever gets a baby aspirin. The brain is an organ, too, and when it flags or fails, you have at least try to make it better.

Taking Rage out of publication certainly didn't stop school shootings, anymore than it directly caused those incidents in the 80s and 90s. Ineffective gun laws, lackadaisical mental health initiatives, and our fitful if well-meaning social experiment play much bigger roles than any work of fiction, Moutain Dew Commercial, or Marilyn Manson song.

The Sandy Hook perpetrator fired 156 rounds and killed twenty-seven people, including himself, in less than five minutes [6]. He was on the spectrum, deeply ill, and completely isolated from the world [7]. His exact prognosis can only be guessed through the remnants of his writings, interviews with those who knew him, and his last, irredeemable actions in this world, since it had been years since anyone had bothered to get him the help he desperately needed. His father and brother were no longer in the picture; his mother allowed her sick son to dictate their lives. As deeply ill as the killer clearly was, his mother still stocked their shared home with plenty of guns and ammunition. He never had to buy a single round. He just had to take one of those unsecured guns, load it, and kill her. Then he gussied up in his proto-military/SWAT swag, drove over to Sandy Hook Elementary, and murdered 26 human beings who had done absolutely nothing to cause his misery.

Instead of censoring Rage, why don't we censor the ability of the weakest, sickest, and most dangerous among us from getting their hands on weapons that can wipe out an entire first grade classroom and support staff in less than five minutes? Instead of focusing our smart-mouthed talking points on one novel, one musical artist, or one video game, why don't we collectively Own Our Shit and admit that, while this problem is undoubtedly complex, there are at least two major, contributing factors that could be addressed any time we are ready to stop bickering and actually Do Something: gun reform and a mental health revofuckinlution. Without a real effort to trust one another, confront the ugliness within our society, and a full-hearted embrace of methodologies that could help everyone (and not just the lucky few), removing Rage (or Skeleton Crew, or Different Seasons, or In Cold Blood, or American Psycho, or Catcher in the Rye...) from the shelves is about as well-intentioned and ineffective as those torrents of thoughts and oceans of prayers.

Grade: B+
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2, it's more unsettling than scary.
Warnings: School shooting, gun violence, slap fights, conformity reform, the phrase "getting it on," asshole dads.
Artifact: Well preserved 1986 paperback reprint, glossy cover, possibly CMYK, but could be flat color, mass market pulp paper, margins to set your hair on end. Large crease on the back cover and roughing of the edges, but the spine adhesive is holding strong and the spine is barely cracked. Oldie but goody.

References
[1] "Guns," Stephen King, ebook, Philtrum Press, January 25, 2013.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Wikipedia, linked.
[4] "Guns," Stephen King, ebook, Philtrum Press, January 25, 2013.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Wikipedia, linked.
[7] Stuff.co.nz, linked.