Summary
Charles Decker murders his teacher and holds the class at gunpoint and brings them round to his nihilistic worldview. They begin sharing embarrassing secrets with one another and growing closer to Decker, turning the class into a twisted sort of therapy group.
This spurs them to turn on Ted Jones, a popular student and the only one not identifying with Decker’s warped view of reality.
When Jones attempts to leave, the class beats him into a coma.
Decker eventually surrenders and is institutionalised. He later receives a letter from a classmate grateful for his actions.
Background
Stephen King would publish four books between 1977 and 1982 under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’. Reasons for this boil down to King wanting to see whether his writing would still sell if it didn’t have his name attached to it.
Although King would be outed as Bachman later in the decade, Bachman proved a fertile ground for ideas such as King’s 1989 novel ‘The Dark Half’ and further titles published under the pseudonym in a meta sense.
‘Rage’ is the earliest book that Stephen King began writing proper, as early as 1966.
Review
While reading ‘Rage’, you can see the stuff that would become King staples, albeit somewhat clipped. Since this is early King, it comes as no surprise that the Bachman books read as an embryonic version of his usual style.
That means no stream-of-consciousness asides, no supernatural elements and no idealism.
Of the Stephen King books I’ve read so far, the closest King parallel I can draw is to 1983’s ’Pet Sematary’. Throughout both books, people are written as fundamentally flawed creatures that will always abuse power to achieve personal gain.
In both cases, King felt discomfort with publishing these ideas under his own name. With ‘Rage’ he’d publish it under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’ and he would sit on ‘Pet Sematary’ for a full year before releasing it to fulfil his contract with Doubleday.
However, ‘Pet Sematary’ depicts humans falling victim to their own power and hubris. At the end Louis Creed has lost his entire family and his sanity, his final fate remaining ambiguous. Creed’s actions begin as rational and morally just, and become more questionable and twisted as he succumbs to the allure of power, in this case the burial ground’s ability to resurrect the dead.
‘Rage’ kicks off with Charlie getting expelled after a history of violence and abuse in school, but he doesn’t care for these consequences because he has a gun in his locker.
He begins the story holding all the cards, and ends in the same position. He holds an entire class hostage and turns them into his willing accomplices against Ted. When a police sniper shoots Decker in the chest, he is miraculously saved by the locker padlock he had just happened to place in his shirt pocket earlier. In the eyes of the narrative, he becomes literally bulletproof.
The class doesn’t turn on Charlie, they let him get into their heads, and they drag Ted down to their level, putting him into a coma.
Even when Decker is non-fatally shot at the end, he provokes this himself and ends the story on his own terms.
Evil never gets out of the driver’s seat.
‘Pet Sematary’ holds a fatalistic worldview best summed up with the line “Sometimes… dead is better”. Stephen King would later argue that “we can only find peace in our human lives by accepting the will of the universe” when discussing the book.
When Louis Creed seeks to challenge the universe’s will, he is punished.
‘Rage’ holds a far more cynical worldview, the idea that everyone can and will fall from grace, the only negotiable criteria being how far. Charlie brags about the toxicity of humanity, that “all that weirdness isn’t just going on outside. It’s in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms.”
What’s more, Charlie Decker never faces punishment. True, he had a traumatic upbringing but that’s a pretty weak excuse for murder. He received trauma therefore he will spread it to others.
When I first read this book about two years ago, I was in a very different state of mind and I even for a time ranked ‘Rage’ as highly as ‘Misery’ for its uncompromising portrayal of how unsavoury people can become given the right or wrong circumstances.
You could say I was like one of Decker’s classmates. I was taken in by his charismatic but ultimately two-dimensional portrayal and I do feel a bit taken-in in hindsight.
But people like Charlie Decker do exist out there. Not everyone is a murderer waiting to happen, but there will always be people who go on power trips like Decker.
That’s kind of the only positive I can glean from ‘Rage’ two years along, the warning about being taken in by people who enable your worst behaviours. And honestly, there are tons of pieces of media that convey that message far more effectively.
Problems with the narrative are purely down to reader interpretation, there’s nothing functionally wrong with the writing.
Bad Stephen King is still highly readable and compelling stuff.
What happened next?
Due to the book being found among the possessions of several school shooters, King allowed ‘Rage’ to fall out of print. While I’m personally of the belief that banning or discontinuing a piece of media will only intensify people’s desires to obtain it, I understand and respect King’s reasons for doing so. I can’t imagine how heartbreaking it would feel to have a piece of your art being used as justification for murder.
Considering ‘Rage’s relative lack of merit amongst the rest of King’s canon, not much has been lost. If you really want to still get ahold of the book, it is still available online through secondhand websites.
If you want something similar, ‘Luckiest Girl Alive’ by Jessica Knoll supplies a much more sympathetic interpretation of the ‘school shooter’ character template. As well as this, the book has a much more relevant and insightful depiction of bullying and misogyny.
King tends to place himself on the side of good, that idealism and morality will always triumph over evil
The Bachman books tend to lean towards a more cynical worldview, they were written by a younger man who may have at times believed it was just him up against the world.
‘Rage’ is a nasty little book, but coming back to it actually made me learn a lot more about myself. I no longer hold ‘Rage’ in such esteem as I once did because of how my own worldview has changed.
Rating: 4 out of 10
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