No multiple parts to this story, but it's pretty short so that's okay, we'll do this all in one shot.

As the story opens with Charlie Decker, a high school student who I believe is in Grade Twelve. He's losing his mind, people are nervous around him at school, and he's being recommended to a school for crazy people because at some point he beat his chemistry teacher nearly to death. I mean, I don't know guys, but when a student beats a teacher nearly to death they don't normally let him go back to school and sit in class like everyone else. But I guess we don't know any details yet.

Charlie is told by the principal that he's off to crazy-town soon, so Charlie decides to start fitting in right away by baiting and angering the principal and then half yanking his own clothes off and running out into the office yelling that the principal tried to rape him. Jesus H., kid. We're 20 pages in and I already kind of hate you. Yeah, maybe the adults here aren't the greatest people in the world, but that's no excuse to be a shithead. I was trained as a teacher myself, and one of my rare fellow male teachers-in-training had something like this happen to him, where two teenage girls in one of his classes told him that if he didn't give them good grades they'd tell the principal he was sexually harassing them. He went to the principal himself first and got everything sorted out, but it is a kind of awful world where teachers have to worry about that sort of thing.

He's done at this school now, so Charlie does the sensible thing and goes to his locker and gets the gun he keeps there, his father's pistol, and a bunch of ammunition. He then keeps being sensible by lighting the contents of his locker on fire, closing it, going back to his algebra class, and shooting his teacher dead with one bullet.

The other students don't freak out. They just kind of sit there, stunned. The fire alarms go off and another adult looks in the room to see why they're not leaving, so Charlie shoots him dead too and still the other students don't panic. It's a little weird. Soon the school is surrounded by firemen and police officers and we've got ourselves a genuine situation, a school shooting long before school shootings were a thing. I said in my Carrie summary that King had predicted downtrodden students lashing back at their tormenters (and anyone else who got in the way), doing so with a supernatural twist, but here he just plain does it without the twist. As a student himself when he wrote this originally, and as a high school teacher as an adult, he looked into the American school system and saw that this is one of the scariest things that could happen, so being who he is he wrote about it.

The principal gets on the intercom and tries to talk Charlie down, but Charlie just messes with him, threatening to shoot more people until he goes outside to talk with the police. Charlie sends a warning that they'd better not try to gas him out. But the weird thing is, and maybe this is just a side effect of the fact that this story is written in first person but the weird thing is that I get the sense I'm supposed to be connecting with Charlie somehow, rooting for him even. He seems to know that he's crazy, but at the same time he thinks of himself as getting even with people who deserve it, getting the upper hand and exposing them as fakes or phonies, that sort of thing. I'm not sure I buy that, kid. When you murdered two people, you kind of lost the right to be misunderstood.

But again, the other students don't seem too worried about the fact that their teacher is lying dead on the floor. Only one, Ted, seems to be thinking this through and realizing the reality of what's going on here. The others sort of start talking to him instead, as though this is just something that happens now and then, so Charlie tells them about his childhood and his father. His father, who he once heard say would cut his mother's nose in half if she ever cheated on him, who once body-slammed his own young son into the ground because he was childishly breaking windows, the father who drinks and has a temper and sounds an awful lot like Jack Torrance's father from The Shining. Ted mocks the idea that Charlie might be trying to blame all this on his parents.

Charlie says he's not trying to do that, but I don't know what he's trying to do. When you go crazy and then tell everyone how your father fucked up your head, it's kind of natural to connect those dots and see the pretty picture they form. But Ted has a secret too, and one of the other students reveals that he quit football to help his family after his mother became an alcoholic, which is apparently a blemish on his all-American record, I don't know man, you can't control what your parents do, but quitting football to help out your family is a pretty mature response to the problem. But Ted seems pretty ashamed and upset that this information is out there, which I can also understand.

The school psychiatrist comes onto the intercom next, and tries to get Charlie to talk about his feelings. Charlie doesn't want to talk about his feelings, so he turns the tables and says that if the shrink asks him any questions he'll kill someone. Then Charlie starts to grill him, asking questions in rapid-fire and acting crazier and crazier, driving the psychiatrist to tears, until Charlie tricks him into asking a question and then shoots the floor, causing the psychiatrist to shit his pants. Charlie tells him it was just a trick, and sends him back outside. And I don't know, again, if this rings quite true. Charlie seems unusually perceptive for his age, but I don't know if he could so quickly turn the psychiatrist into a pile of weeping mush by going crazy and pretending to kill someone. Maybe he's just a shitty psychiatrist.

Either way, the other students, still seemingly okay with the fact that they're being held hostage by someone who just murdered the teacher, think Charlie's stunt with the psychiatrist was brilliant and awesome and fuck you, kids, this is a little more serious than that. I know high school students are punks, but they're not this bad. You can't tell me a whole class of 18-year-olds would secretly be okay with this sort of thing.

But they all seem to be going through the world's fastest Stockholm Syndrome, and next they start arguing with each other about pointless high school crap, until Charlie forces two of them to have a slapping match until one yields the argument. That's kind of weird. The media arrives outside and the kids listen in on a transistor radio, at which point they're all upset that the news is calling them children. Well I'm sorry, children, but when your teacher has been murdered in front of you and you're concerned that the media is disrespecting the guy who pulled the trigger, then yeah, you're all children, okay?

Next we get to hear some embarrassing things about the students as they begin to admit them. One admits she's smelly and boys don't like her and she doesn't know how to fix it. Another talks about how his mother grinds him down and forces him to be the impoverished, vaguely ashamed person he is. Charlie talks about how his mother once forced him to wear a suit to the birthday party of the girl he had a crush on, and he got beat up by another kid on her lawn.

It sounds like I'm complaining, and I guess I am, but I'm not being entirely fair. The dialogue is fairly good, even though I'm not convinced at all that it's realistic given the characters and the situation. Charlie has some interesting insights and an interesting train-of-thought process, though again it doesn't feel authentic, and it doesn't really feel like the words of a crazy person. It seems more like the words of a smart, perceptive, downtrodden high school student who is thinking about what it would be like to go crazy and kill his teacher and magically get all the students to respect him because of it. Like this whole story is a twisted sort of fantasy instead of an actual situation. It's interesting, but it's bizarre.

Next up, the girl Charlie currently has a crush on admits that she had sex with Ted. Charlie loses his mind and goes to shoot Ted because of this, but at that moment a police sharpshooter takes Charlie out, bang. Right in the chest. Except Charlie had his padlock from his locker in a shirt pocket, and the bullet struck it directly, leaving him alive. Ted tries to escape but Charlie stays conscious and forces him to stay, then forces the police to back off.

Sandra, the girl he's crushing on, known to the class as a good girl, continues her sex story as though nothing happened, telling the others casually about how Ted and she did it in the back of his car and he didn't use a condom but she didn't get knocked up. But then she went out and let some random stranger with greasy fingers do her too afterward, just because it was exciting. She says that it made her feel real, and that all this crazy shit going on in the classroom makes her feel real too, so she actually thanks Charlie for doing this. Seriously, how much more of an adolescent revenge/respect fantasy can this thing get?

Charlie tells his sex story next, which is about how he went to a party with his friend and his friend's older brother, got high on drugs, and got a chance to do it with the friend's brother's girlfriend, but he loses his erection and can't do it. Poor Charlie. But the actual weird thing about this is that Pete, the friend's brother, is going out with this girl, the same girl who is throwing the party, but Pete didn't hear about the party until earlier that day when he was at the university on a Saturday and heard about the party from a local loser. So his girlfriend threw a huge party with dozens of people and didn't tell her boyfriend about it, then when her boyfriend showed up anyway she tried to fuck the underage stoned kid who came with her boyfriend's brother. I think that relationship has issues. Anyway, the moral of the story is that later that night Charlie dreamed about his father killing his mother and leaving her body in his bed, and this gave him his erection back, and they lived happily ever after.

But the students don't really care about Charlie's fucked up stories anymore, they thought Sandra's was a lot better. Charlie can tell he's losing them, so he tells the police chief to give him one more hour and then he'll let everyone go unharmed.

With his one hour, first he tells the other students about how he nearly killed a teacher, the event that made people think he was crazy and dangerous (clearly they just didn't understand!). The chemistry teacher was making him do problems on the board and mocking him when he couldn't solve them, which is a pretty shitty way to teach. Charlie had been carrying a pipe wrench in his pocket to help him feel more confident, and it fell out to the floor while he was at the board. When the teacher tries to take it, Charlie goes berserk and uses it to smash the board. The teacher tries to restrain him and Charlie fractures his skull with the wrench, nearly killing him. Yes, mocking you was pretty shitty, Charlie, I'll give you that. But you're still crazy.

Afterward his own father tried to punish him and for the first time Charlie stood up to him, fighting back and saving himself from a beating. After that they avoided each other. The one day Charlie murdered his algebra teacher, and now here we are. Circle closed.

And now? Now the story gets fucking weird, folks. Charlie insinuates that there's one more thing the students need to do before they leave and go home. He doesn't say what it is, but they seem to understand. They understand that somehow Ted is the bad guy now, all-American Ted with the drunk mother, who tried to stand up to Charlie, who had sex with Sandra, who was outraged at what Charlie did and incredulous that he's the only one who cares that Charlie murdered people. Somehow they all think Ted's the real villain now, so they surround him, grab him, mob him, hurt him, and leave him catatonic on the floor. Then Charlie lets them leave.

Wait. Excuse me. What the fuck? Fut the wuck? We've gone beyond adolescent revenge/respect fantasy and into full-on uncanny valley in here. If you tried very hard, you might be able to convince me that a whole class full of students wouldn't really care that their teacher was murdered and would come to side with the murderer after they do a whole messed-up bonding thing. But there is nothing you can say to make me believe that at the end of all that, they would all spontaneously turn into animals and attack the one student who didn't go along with their Charlie Cheerleading Club. Yeah, Ted's got some problems and has made some of the usual teenage mistakes just like the rest of them, and yeah, Ted has a reputation and an attitude like he's above all that even though he really isn't, but this part of the story just makes no sense. Within four hours, Charlie has turned a class full of normal high schoolers into irrational Charlie-loving monsters, and I'm having serous troubles suspending my disbelief here. It's just weird, and King hasn't convinced me that any of the things that have happened would plausibly lead to this result.

At any rate, the other students all leave, the police chief comes in to get Charlie, and Charlie tries to commit suicide by cop, pretending to reach for the gun so that the officer shoots him three times. He didn't die though, instead he gets to live in the crazy house with the other crazy people, and so does Ted, who remains catatonic after the other kids brutalized him.

After reading it, I can understand why King eventually decided to take it out of print. There's nothing all that shocking in there, not to modern readers who are used to things like Columbine and Virginia Tech and all the others, but the thing is, this is a story where the student who snaps and murders teachers ends up kind of being the good guy. He ends up earning the respect and admiration of his fellow students, and he turns them all against the popular male who had sex with the girl Charlie had a crush on but could never ask out. It's exactly the sort of thing some poor kid might daydream about in his darker moments, all played out in a way that works out great for the crazy guy. And you just know that there are some kids out there who can't separate fact from fiction so well, and who would be unable to help thinking how great it would be if they could earn some respect by lashing out.

That's not King's fault. He wrote this before school shootings were a thing. But it's a reality, so the older King took it off his conscience and did away with the book once and for all.