Once again, my summary and thoughts will be in the reply to this post. This initial post contains some spoiler-free background information. I will also include a brief spoiler-free review and my final score as a separate reply below. If you've already read the book or if you're curious about what happens and don't ever plan to read it yourself, give the summary post a whirl. If you think maybe someday you'll read it and you don't want to risk any sort of spoilers whatsoever, then skip it, that's fair. But are you really going to read all these Stephen King books someday?

Rage (September 1977)

Wow, where to begin? This one has a lot of back story before we start.

First, Rage was the first novel that Stephen King published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. He actually wrote it some years before, when he was a teenager, and dusted it off and updated it to use for this project.

The Bachman project is a strange thing. King had published three novels at this point, and had become a famous and wealthy man by writer standards. But he began to wonder if he had really earned it. He started to wonder if he was famous because of his own skills or just because he got lucky, wrote the right book at the right time and became a household name, with the rest of his books just selling on autopilot because he was famous after Carrie.

This is an odd idea, because we can see now that even if he struck it lucky with Carrie, he improved quite a bit with each of the books afterward, and The Shining was a legitimately good popular novel. But King was already looking his gift horse in the mouth and wondering. So he decided to run a test.

King came up with a plan to start publishing novels under the name Richard Bachman to see what would happen, to see if "Bachman" would become famous too, to see if it really was his own talent that had made him famous or if it was just a fluke. So he pulled Rage out of his closet, gave it a new draft, and started publishing books as two people at once.

Rage never became a hit on its own, nor did any of his other four "Bachman books". Does that mean King really did just hit it lucky, and that no matter how good a writer you are you still need that flash of chance to make it? Maybe. But it's also fair to say that his Richard Bachman books are for the most part quite different from his Stephen King books. They don't have the same level of supernatural. In tone they are much closer to the work he does with his novellas, and while he has written some excellent novellas, he might never have become famous as Stephen King either if that's all he ever wrote.

Regardless, here we have our first Bachman book. It is actually no longer in print, because it contains an in-depth description of a school shooting, and it is believed that the book inspired some few future school shootings over the 20 years following its publication. Because of this, King decided to end all printing of Rage, and any Bachman Book collections printed today don't have it. But if you want to read it you can probably still find it in a used bookstore or a library. My used copy of The Bachman Books collection contains Rage, so here we go.