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. |
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. |
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 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.
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.
 |
| 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. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
 |
| 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. |
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. |
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...
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.
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.
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.
 |
| 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. |
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. |
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.
Kudos to gun control and mental health revofuckinlution. As frustrated as I get with people who won't entertain for a moment the idea of sensible gun laws, I'm even more irritated with those who invalidate the idea of mental health reform. Aren't there at least a million other reasons for better mental healthcare than shootings? Our healthcare sucks but our mental healthcare is even worse.
ReplyDeleteI didn't find your post additionally traumatizing. When a nightmare occurs, and particularly when someone chooses to unleash a nightmare on others, the reverberating question is always "WHY?!" I find it helpful to explore possible reasons even if I'll never fully understand. ��