The Apt Bodyshank Method (Different Seasons, 1982)

Different Seasons (1982)

Grab the popcorn and put the book back on the shelf. You'll thank me later. 

I had the 1983 Signet edition featuring the original
hardcover art. It depicted the seasons and was
breathtakingly beautiful. I have no idea what
 moon baby is up to in this edition.

One of the interesting consequences to re-reading all of Stephen King's novels and collections in chronological order is the strange doubling of psyche, like viewing myself through a smeary prism, the light flashing me blind, the warped cut of the glass twisting backflips into a black lake. What was I thinking when I read this? What impressions did it make? Why didn't I notice then some of the things that are achingly glaring now? What did this mean to me? And what does that say about who I was?

I read The Shining and Carrie a summer apart; the first during enormous change both financially and socially, the second when I was well submerged in the pit; fractured, volatile, and resentfully wiser. Yet if none of the personal upheaval had happened--had we stayed in our east side home, had I gone to the school I was supposed to attend that next year, had it all gone as I believed it would up until that fateful birthday at Chi Chi's, all strained reverie with a nasty surprise at the end (your mother lost her job, you are probably going to move, who can guess where you will go to school now, blow out the candles)--I still would have been deep in the snarling thickets of puberty. I still would have been cliquish, selfish, immature, and v-o-l-a-t-i-l-e. So very volatile.

Instead of the scan of the inside cover, the second "page" is an Internet Archive notification. 

I wonder if I would have become so completely obsessed with King's works as I did, or if I would have wandered across them eventually, never needing the distraction the way I did that first summer, bored and scared all at once, pent up alone in a strange new house in a neighborhood where I knew no one, worried about starting at a new school (middle school no less) and looking for just about anything to distract me. I'd been hurt by my mother's interests before, seeing movies I should never have seen from as far back into my childhood as I can remember, so skimming over those rows of titles--on bookcases, shelves propped on cinder blocks, stacked here, stacked there--I was loathe to get into anything I knew she truly loved. It was mostly sci fi/fantasy garbagio, and I wasn't taking that bait. Who knew how much incestuous (Excalibur), gang-rapey (some Western), robot sex (Heavy Metal) might be lurking in those pages?

The fact that I knew there would be a nekkid dead lady trying to seduce the main pro/antagonist didn't deter me from reading The Shining because I already knew that it was the worst thing that would happen in the book. Probably. I remembered that part of the movie from an ill-advised home cable viewing at my aunt's house at the dear, sweet age of nine. I had suffered my own bathroom fears because of it, watching the light from the hall through a crack in the door convinced I'd seen a flutter of movement, but in my opinion the scene still wasn't on par with the degenerate "sex stuff" I'd come to loathe and, even if someone might claim that it was still "sex stuff," it couldn't be happening to a nicer guy.

Evidence of a quick scan?
 The bottom of every page is missing.

By the time I read Carrie, I was well ensconced in vengeful thinking, mentally smiting my enemies with dark thoughts and vicious wishes. But while the stress at home compounded my suffering, I wonder if the travails of middle school would have been much different under subjectively "better" circumstances. It seems that junior high is a universal proving ground for us all, the teenage thunderdome if you will, a punch-out death match where someone, somewhere hates you with a fire of a thousand suns. Everyone suffers in junior high. Or so I've heard. I also heard that high school is like that for many, though that was not my experience. It is likely someone hated me in high school, more than one someone, even, and of course the boys barked in the yard, but by then it was amateur hour. All the real brawlers had dropped out before ninth grade.

Don't fret. I'm not suggesting my proving ground was bigger, meaner, or crueler than yours . . . I'm stating it as a fact. *BlessT*

These one word praise pages are delivering the synonyms.

Rereading Different Seasons now was as disorienting as attending junior high then. The doubling, tripling reflections of me then and me now are more than a little alienating. It is important to note that Different Seasons was one of the King works I clung to the hardest for a sense of sanity during an otherwise chaotic period. I didn't care that it wasn't horror. What mattered was that now-familiar Voice. King's clear, unwavering, one-of-a-kind Voice packed into four whole and living stories. King's works would take me out of the tension of constant surveillance, harassment, touching, shoving, name-calling, and assault . . . and would send me places where broken, haunted people were facing down their worst nightmares: blood-soaked prom, mad daddy with a mallet, possessed laundry machine, an innocent man serving life. It was always a thrill, a magnificent ride through the screaming dark, to watch others fight, claw, earn their lives. It made my own problems recede, even if it was a temporary reprieve.

"Great."

I read Different Seasons sometime during the 8th grade school year, the hot zone, the shit show, the heart of darkness, with the soundtrack to Pink Floyd's The Wall seamed into my off-brand portable tape player, my aching brain thrumming to the beat like a deep basement of rumbling mainframes hissing, pulsing in the dark. King's collection of novellas was a life raft, a lullaby. Mostly. I found the last tale in the tome exceedingly long and shockingly dull despite the gruesome crescendo to the story-within-the-story. On the bright side, every time I come back around to The Breathing Method, it's a brand new tale. It will not stick. Not because it is too horrifying (it is, in an Amazing Stories meets Clive Barker sort of way), but because it simply doesn't resonate. Whenever I would speak of Different Seasons to my friends, with all the unabashed glowing of a preteen who has just discovered Fine Art, I would tell them to skip the last one. Or just tell them where to find the oogy part and be done with it, like snatching a peek at a Hustler hidden in the garage.

Buy my wares!

The other three tales were a revelation, each with their own merits, each sterling and shining in the soft glow of miraculous creation, to be revered, showcased, and dusted frequently. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption was my first prison story, a deep dive into the ugly world of mid-20th century American incarceration. I believed every word as gospel and was completely gobsmacked by the tale itself: wrenching, extraordinary, inspiring. The Body was equally entertaining and much closer to home, though boys were alien fart-beasts, we still had enough in common to relate, especially to the stormy steeplechase of friendships over the course of any given day and into the long span of years. Apt Pupil challenged me the most, however, because I'd never encountered a story where there was no real protagonist. I had zero empathy for guidance counselors at the time (for reasons), but in retrospect Rubber Ed was the closest the story got to any real protagonist, save of course poor Mr. Heisel who not only breaks his back and lands himself in the hospital, but realizes the man he's been cohabitating with in shared convalescence is none other than the Nazi monster who killed his family during the war. These are bit players, however, so they can't really carry the "protagonist" moniker. Instead, Apt Pupil is just one little monster and one big monster waxing sentimental about the Holocaust and trying to outmonster each other in the process, broiling live cats and killing homeless men for sport. It's a well-written yarn, but taxing. For a thirteen-year-old who knew next-to-nothing about the Holocaust at the time, it was overwhelming.

Thirty-fifth reprint, y'all. I can't even.

Thirty-five years later and a world of events apart, Different Seasons is a whole different book. With the exception of Apt Pupil, the movies outshine the stories by miles and in ways I never noticed when they were released in theaters. I vaguely knew that they were altered from the source material, but had forgotten just how altered. We're not talking Running- and/or "Lawnmower Man" levels of disconnect, but enough to shift my entire perception of the book as a whole. And, sorry, much like my adolescence, we're going to pretend that The Breathing Method doesn't exist.

Apt Pupil is pretty much the same as I remembered it, though a bit clunky and a lot gimmicky, specifically when young Todd's mother repeatedly tells people he is an "apt pupil." It was already jarring phrasing from a 1985 perspective, like some cornball dialogue from the 1950s, but it simply was not clever enough to repeat beyond the first time. We got it. He's an all-American little asshole: blonde, athletic, sociopathic, and a very apt pupil.

Otherwise it is an engaging tale, certainly one that sparked many a fan to wonder how the hell King thinks up this kind of stuff. I saw the movie once and vaguely remember it. I don't think it added or took away from the overall merit of the story. What I remember more than the actual movie itself was the fact that it was an old bootleg copy, the kind people sell on the streets of NYC, of which my then boyfriend had an endless supply. I played it in his sunlit Sunday kitchen on one of those cheap, early flatscreens with the built-in DVD player. You know the kind with the white film across the picture, where even the most HD-perfect program was rendered sort of gauzy and ill-defined? Imagine watching a bootleg of that dark-ass movie on one of those. I think the bootleg even skipped parts. I was okay with it. Like I said, it's a taxing tale.

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption was a disappointment this time around. The chasm between preteen me and ancient ogress me is indeed wide. I remembered it so differently. Prisms, prisms. What has time done to you, O Shawshank? It's a very basic narrative tale, sparingly descriptive, which allows the reader to fill in the color and texture of the world, I suppose . . . except that it is largely impossible to do now. Few of King's book-to-movie works stand as highly respected and beloved as The Shawshank Redemption. I remember the swell of pride that I felt when the movie came out and everyone was shocked that such a straightforward, emotional story came from that Stephen King. I was happy for him . . . and glad that this weird little bespectacled dude known for really hyucking it up in those film adaptation cameos was being recognized as a great storyteller, not just "some horror writer."

After the contents, everything gets churned up and spit out of the
 awkward mechanism of e-book conversion. Each novella is proceeded
by a different piece of art (as seen here) which they've jammed in there
for your viewing pleasure.

So many things going on here. I can almost smell the smoke.

Speaking of which: My newfound disenchantment with a few of his earlier works aside, I have never understood the blinding hatred some critics have harbored for Stephen King. I don't understand the compulsion to box writers like King into their respective genres. Horror, Westerns, Romance, Sci Fi . . . totally cool if that's your jam and what you are known for and what readers flock to your work in droves to feast and feast and clamor for more, but why the snotfest from reviewers, academics, and other, miscellaneous literary snobs? There's always this undercurrent of disdain, no matter what the writer does, what he writes, how fucking good he is at his craft, like the Tedious VonSnotwinkles of the world were made to walk through sludge and must scrape off a scalding review for having been forced to endure it. Even the much beloved Shawshank film is "shit" because it is commercial, too broadly attractive to the smelly masses, a silly reverie, an unrealistic fantasy spun by a whittler of wooden gargoyles. The fact that it was nominated for an Academy Award is irrelevant.

Here are the facts: King has written things that have brought me to honking, inconsolable tears. He has knocked the breath out of me and left me thrumming with joy. Horror or not, he's a Great Fucking Writer.

Even so, there are the disappointments, though in this case it is hard to hold the novella accountable against the lasting success of the movie. Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is a pale thing, an outline, even. Because the movie punched color and breath into the thing and made it Sing. They took King's story and simplified it, condensed all the bad guys (a series of wardens and guards) into a single set of monsters (the Warden, the Guard), cranked up the severity of the stakes (the kid who knows who really killed Andy Dufresne's wife doesn't die in the book), and turned the big reveal into poetry with the power of Morgan Freeman's narration and that single defining shot of Tim Robbins standing in the rain, arms outstretched, free, free, free. The movie rocks and rolls, punches low and hard ("Brooks was here") and lifts you up into the sky, zero g's and yelling. It is a hard story, an unfair story, terrifying and infuriating . . . but the payoff is king. The book does a good job in the telling, but the movie soars. It's an American classic.

Wil Wheaton (Gordie), River Phoenix (Chris), Jerry O'Connell
(Vern), and Corey Feldman (Teddy)

While Shawshank is a standard favorite of the masses, no other movie sprung from King's oeuvre will ever come close to rivaling for my affections as the adaptation of The Body, better known as Stand By Me. I liked the story a great deal when I read it, felt connected to Gordie Lachance because I too was a fledgling peep of a writer batting around her little nest. Set again in the fictitious town of Castle Rock, King is deep in his descriptive mode, as he so often is when the place is its own character, one that requires detail and grit. The Body wasn't a favorite among the books and stories that I'd read to that point, but it stood securely somewhere in the middle.

The next year, the movie Stand By Me came out and eclipsed my memory of the novella completely. I saw it in the theater and was transported. Once it made its way to cable, it became a part of my culture, endlessly quoted, constantly referenced. We taped it off of HBO, of course, and still watched it every time it came on, anyway, reciting the movie ad nauseam and to our never-ending delight. In every yearbook thereafter, if I wasn't quoting Real Science ("I drank what?") I was quoting our favorite line from Stand By Me, delivered with withering care by Wil Wheaton, "No, Vern. They just let him in." It was sweet, stupid, wonderful, emotional, and weird. We loved Stand By Me.

At the time, as perfect as I thought the movie was, I still had two problems with it: First, it is unabashedly dorky. For example, when they are telling each other what a great time they are having ("A blast") and being hokey beyond all reason. Maybe it's a Maine thing, like saying a'yuh. I don't know. It was jarring in the book and doubly jarring in the movie. I think kids say stuff like that when they're five, but twelve or thirteen? Only if they want to get ranked to the dogs and back.

Second, that title. To be fair, The Body isn't great, either, but it's like they stretched it to fit around being able to use the song. Technically, it fits, because Chris literally stands by Gordie during the showdown with the town thugs . . . buuuuuuuuuuut, come on. It's a bit on the nose, cutesy wootsy, holding hands and telling each other this is really a good time, the most.

These are small things, though, in comparison to the goofiness, bravado, hilarity, and raw emotion of preteen boys on a dubious adventure, following the railroad tracks for miles to see a dead body. The young actors are extraordinary, each inhabiting his role like a second skin, and while there might be minor wobbles in reality here and there, they are so goddamned good it's criminal. It is important to remember how hammy child acting could be back then (and through time immemorial, really), so overwrought and shrill, and the audience just had to live with it because what else could you expect of kid actors? It was enough that they remembered their lines. Every once in awhile you'd see a performance from a kid that was 100% authentic (Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun and all the kids in E.T. come immediately to mind), but mostly it was cheesecake bullshit custom made to fit whatever adults thought kids should sound like at the time. Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell were phenomenal.

What a revelation it was to read The Body again after so many years. I was surprised by Shawshank, but absolutely floored by The Body. I suspect my love for the movie effectively wiped out my memory of King's story. It's not entirely different, the basic story remains the same, but there are changes to the plot in the movie that enhanced pivotal moments (such as when Chris confesses that he stole the milk money) or deepened the meaning behind the character's motivations. For example, in the book, Gordie is far more conflicted about his relationship with his recently deceased brother. In the movie, Gordie adores his brother, as is depicted in several soft-focus flashbacks. And the feeling is mutual. In the book, he is more of a stranger, still idolized by their parents, but removed from Gordie. In Gordie's nightmare, it is his deceased brother, rather than their bitter father, who tells him, "It should have been you."

Technically, there's a third thing that used to bug me about the movie that I've
come to love over the years: The corner-cutting on the barf-o-rama scene.
To be fair, it's not meant to be watched repeatedly and picked apart by random
viewers, but it's hard not to notice how everyone is puking pie even though
only the contestants were gorging on it. I suppose you could assume that every
single person in the audience had just eaten pie, but nah. Also, the hilarious
jets of vomit often do not align with the actor's mouths, as above.
It's still funny, though.

"Did Lard Ass have to pay to get into the contest?"

Of course I had a massive crush on him. Who didn't?

In the book, Ace Merrill and his merry band of miscreants are only seen at the confrontation at the body (with subsequent mentions in the epilogue as each of the boys gets a beat down for their defiance), where in the movie he and his idiot friends play far more important roles. When Ace faces off with Gordie and Chris in the book, it is Chris who pulls the gun on him, while in the movie Gordie is the one who pulls the gun. Only the movie has that chilling exchange, "What are you going to do? Shoot us all?" "No, Ace. Just you." (This was also the premier of a long line of Fabulous Assholes played to perfection by Kiefer Sutherland, bringing his simmering intimidation A-game to the fore. When he passed us one day on the streets of New York, my first thought wasn't O my gingersnaps it's Jack Twenty-four, it was holy jingleballs it's Ace Fucking Merrill.)

There are ton of little details like that, things that vary from the book in heft, in focus, in depth. But the most striking thing of all--the thing that just knocked me out of my Keds this time around--was how dark and ugly the book is by comparison. When I saw the movie in the theater, I knew they'd sanitized it (though at the time I didn't have the word for it), but until now I hadn't realized just how much had changed. There's no lovable dummy, for one. In the book, Vern and Teddy are both average to below-average kids, while Chris and Gordie are similar to the screen depictions, but tougher, and much more rough around the edges. As a group, they are meaner and not nearly as funny. Vern with his comb and seven cents, crawling across the trestle at a snail's pace, none of that levity is there. There is only a passing reference to the myriad of topics they discuss before bedding down for the night. And while the pie eating contest does appear in the book, so does a moody little story called "Stud City" which is all kinds of uncomfortably grim.

Still, there was more to that sense of darkness than just a few missing jokes and jolly sing-alongs.

I knew when I started reading Different Seasons that I would be encountering yet more of the cursed "n-word," because how could you not when the very first story is set almost entirely in a prison? When I started this little project all the way back at Carrie, I made a point to mentally mark bigoted words as a passing warning, figuring that if they were jarring to me in 2020, they'd be jarring to anyone else unfamiliar or far removed from informal, lackadaisical depictions bigotry. I didn't keep a scorecard because I didn't want to overemphasize something I considered to be a foul but undeniable facet of American culture. I would make note of it in the postscript of each blog entry and be done with it. Even then, I wondered if I was overreacting since everyone knows that social mores have changed over time, that authors like King have been taken to task for this kind of crap already, etc. etc., so did it matter if I made a note of casual bigotry or not? Was I just overreacting?

This parting shot of River Phoenix was always wrenching, but became all the
more poignant when he died of a drug overdose at the age of 23. It was
impossible not to draw connections between the character Chris and the
actor River, both with unlimited potential, both gone far too young. 

This time I decided to screenshot every instance I encountered. It turns out Different Seasons is the reigning champion of derogatory word usage in the King bibliography thus far in the chronology. The novel It will knock Different Seasons out of the park (and off the planet, probably), but it was still far worse than I remembered. And so varied in usages, too, like a colorful spray of mean-mouthed, poisonous flowers.

If you are thinking the majority of the usage is in prison-yard smack talk or teenage verbal brawling, think again. Most of the bigotry is passive, matter-of-fact narrative flair. The Body has almost twice the pejorative terms as nazi-fied Apt Pupil and prison-set Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption combined.

I sound like a puerile, Nitty Nancy little snitch, but it is the power of the words themselves that tell a broader story. When I read The Body back in 1985, the only term I might've flinched at was the one use of the n-word because it is said in a particularly ugly and unexpected way. Might have. Because hey, these are kids in the fifties or sixties or something, way back when and that's just how they talked smack, right? But here is the thing: I guarantee you I never flinched at "polack," "you ain't gonna jap me," "doing the Allah bit--'Salami, salami, baloney,'" "It ain't pussy . . . you ain't no queer," "going faggot," "gyp," or "retard." Because our world was packed with that bullshit from sun up to sun down 24-7, except (maybe) church. If anyone tells you different, they are straight up lying.

Those prisms cut with sharp light. It may seem that I'm piling on King or society as a whole, but never doubt I'm reserving a whole whopping helping for myself. Back in the late aughts, I loaned a copy of my favorite King title (at the time) to a close friend, only to have it returned to me the following day. She said she started it, but realized she wasn't going to be able to read it, that it wasn't her kind of book. It stung. We made a pact never to discuss it further, first because it wouldn't have been productive to argue over whatever it was that turned her off, and second to keep my love for the book largely unsullied. Though, to be completely honest, I never forgot it. We haven't discussed it since, but I've imagined the reasons why she rejected it because that is just my nature. If there's something to worry at, I'm gonna. And if I had to venture a guess I'd tell you it was likely that first scene, set in 1985 Derry, Maine, where two gay men are assaulted by a gang of homophobic jackals. It's written about as empathetically as one might expect from an author who just a few years prior uses the "fa-word" in all seriousness as a grown-ass narrator questioning his own hyper-vigilant, paper-thin masculinity just because he cares for his boyhood friend. Still, it's a fumble, and reading the onslaught of hate-filled verbal and physical assaults is punishing. When the same friend said they turned off The Hangover right after the "Paging Dr. Fa**ot" line, I pretty much knew. Even so, I thought she was being sensitive.

She wasn't. I was being insensitive. I was not mature enough (or strong enough) to do the intellectual work required to get from focusing on my discomfort (and facing my own prejudices, lazy as they were) to acknowledging that words can be weapons, words can hurt, and normalizing these words only serves to diminish, devalue, and destroy someone else. If that was a mere decade ago, imagine the thirteen-year-old Kansas girl in 1985. (Side note, good advice and please take it: If someone in your life has a habit of telling you that you are "too sensitive" when you react defensively to "teasing," please know that this is gaslighting bullshit and you have the right to uphold and defend your boundaries. You are not "too sensitive," they are being insensitive. Standing up for yourself is far braver than whingeing over being called out for bad behavior.)

Today, most of the terms above are making their desultory drag to the garbage bin of history, filing one by one to the bottom of the dark barrel as the times that bred them and the people that kept them alive have passed. Every last one has required some sort of level-headed intervention, one voice, a group of voices who stand make the case for why the term is derogatory and should not be used. Sometimes words are used with the full force of knowledge behind them, other times it is just ignorance. For instance, never having seen the term "gyp" in writing until I read this story, I believed the word was "jip," a benign word with no offensive origin. Furthermore, my "gypsy" knowledge was extremely narrow, focused mainly on the Stevie Nicks interpretation (e.g. magical, mysterious, twirly), palm readers, and caravans of free spirits selling wares and following astrological charts. Basically, a cartoonish interpretation based entirely on scraps of pop culture majoring in Welsh Witch Megrims and minoring in Muppet Show mysticism.

It is the most violent, hateful, virulent words that endure. The fearful and willfully ignorant cling to them like air, the only power of the impotently enraged. This is why I warn. Because across a wide ocean of media and my own memories of those days gone by, it is impossible not to see how prevalent and casual the bigotry was, ugly language scattershot into a crowd to demean and invalidate anyone who was different. It was far too easy, far too common. While the often meandering drive to eradicate hate speech has flushed the true blue bigots out into the light, there are far too many go-along-get-along Larrys left who are unhappy to be corrected at all. These days, the ones screaming "snowflakes" the loudest are calling themselves out.

Rereading early King reminded me of a particularly bizarre pejorative term that I believed to be all but dead: the Polish joke. It is all over Different Seasons and remains mystifying, despite now knowing more of the history behind it. I literally had to look it up because until right here and now I had no idea why it existed at all. I still don't understand why it remained prevalent when I was growing up in the 1970s. It was particularly common in grade school. The gist, always, was that they were stupid. None of us little snotnoses knew why. No one had any idea where it started or for what reason. But, kids being kids, the jokes went round and round. As far as I recall, no one knew anyone Polish. Not in white bread, generations upon generations of Euro-mixed Kansas. It was likely picked up from parents and grandparents grinding their own xenophobic nonsense.

When I started reading Different Seasons I thought it would be like sliding back into a hot sudsy tub of familiar, foamy fun. Prison lite. Field trip from Ha-ha-Hell. These crazy Nazi assholes who deserve each other. That other one. But it was a stinging-cold camp shower in the brittle blue light of morning, mosquito bitten and water logged. I am glad King created these stories so that they could find their way to screen, warts and all. I am glad for the shock of it, too, the bleary prism between now and the not so way back when. I'm not the one who decides whether there's merit in portraying a time period as it truly was, casual racism and cruel bigotry and all, but it does tint the experience in a light that may be too harsh to bear.

Grade: B
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2. Apt Pupil and The Breathing Method have the "scariest" elements, but the first is more of a thriller and the last just has that one shocker that isn't so much scary as it is, well, gnarly.
Warnings: Cornucopia of offensive language, covered above. Interestingly, the reviewers on Commonsensemedia.com spend a good amount of time warning parents about the copious "f-word" and "s-word" usage in the film, but no one mentions the "fa-word" which is uttered twice, though it is used far less in the film depiction than the novella. There is also a great deal of concern over the smoking O MY. Also note: Depictions of prison gang rape (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption) and torture rape (Apt Pupil). The horrific atrocities enacted upon the victims of the Holocaust are portrayed to varying degree in Apt Pupil, and can be too much to absorb especially if you know little to nothing about those events.

Artifact: The Internet Archive strikes again! Turns out, they were only making the archive completely "open" until mid-June, which likely explains why most of the Firestarter scans "disappeared" when I went back to double check some things. However! The Internet Archive is still available, though now I'm limited to checking out just one item at a time. This works for me since I've never been keen on reading multiple books at a time, anyway. This time around, I took what I could get, a scan of a beat to hell paperback edition that published well after the version I used to own. The preliminaries and the back cover are straight scans, while the rest of it is a scanned-in ebook file, resplendent with weird breaks, glaring errors, and missing chunks of text. It has been a real pleasure to dive back into the olden, golden days of e-publishing! It wasn't bothersome since I've read Different Seasons so many times, anyway, but it was funny in a sort of horrible flashback kind of way. I've had the pleasure of taking calls from authors and customers hollering about all the unforgivable and shocking mistakes found in those early ebooks, one especially memorable incident with a Random House customer who would not accept that publishers were, sadly, not all linked under one titanic mothership. He was absolutely furious that I would not personally correct his ebook . . . from another publisher . . . through the phone. Really a good time . . . the most . . . a blast.

Conversion woes, example 1: "TrmnT," e.g. "Train!"
Also, half the time it was "Vern," the other half, "Vera." 

Something's missing. Probably wasn't important.

My favorite quirk in the conversion--BY FAR--was the inconsistent and totally
wild running heads that would pop up mid-sentence or just wherever because,
ya know, they're wildin. This was my favorite because there is a random "Hi"
at the top as if some bored intern who had no idea what was happening
just typed "Hi" into the master file like a Vern/Vera.

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.