Rage is the story of Charlie Decker. Set in the mid-1970's, Charlie is a Senior at Placerville High, and Charlie is a little off his rocker. The story opens with Charlie being called out of math class to the Principal's office. There, we learn that Charlie is being considered for expulsion for an assault on a teacher. Charlie has a confrontation with the Principal when the he is informed that he is being expelled and sent to a program for disturbed youth. Charlie goes to his locker, collects his gun (Yes, Charlie has a gun, the reasons become clear later in the story), sets his locker on fire, returns to his Algebra class, shoots and kills his Algebra teacher, and takes his class hostage. What unfolds over the next 4 hours is a baring of souls and emotions as the captive students talk about their fears and secrets.
What the fuck, right? I know you're thinking 'Who doesn't just shit their pants and fear for their lives if they've been taken hostage?'
I agree, and that's part of the argument I'm about to make. Before we get into that, a brief look at the short life of Richard Bachman.
King came up with the idea of publishing under a pseudonym to give exposure to some of his other works, as well as to increase his output. The general convention of the time was that an author released one book per year, if not less. King had written stories that were different from his known terror genre, and they agreed to release them. 'Rage' was the first Bachman novel, published in 1977. King went on to publish 4 other books, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man, and Thinner, before the Bachman ruse was exposed in 1985. Once the cat was out of the bag, King claimed ownership of the name, eventually publishing two more books under Bachman authorship.
Get it? Got it? Good.
Now that we've got that out of the way, where do we go from here? Back in time, that's where.
I first encountered Richard Bachman and Charlie Decker in the Lorain Public Library as a boy of 9 or 10. By that time, thanks to my Mother and my Aunt's influence, I was steadily working my way through every Stephen King book I could get my hands on. When I hopped on my bike and rode a few blocks to the library and happened upon The Bachman Books, it was like I'd just discovered buried treasure.
The Bachman Books is a collection of the first four Bachman novels, along with a brief essay by King explaining his use of the pseudonym. Rage is the first book in the collection, so it's where I began.
I remember holding this book like it was yesterday.
What struck me about the Bachman Books was the lack of supernatural in the stories. King, at that point, was known for ghosts, goblins, wild creatures, vampires, evil, etc., and the Bachman Books were void of all of that. Even at the tender age of 10, I could recognize the focus on sociological decay. These were human stories, and at that point, I felt they all had a sympathetic antagonist.
I was too young to resonate with Charlie Decker. I didn't understand teen angst, I didn't understand the misguided contempt that kids will have for their parents when they're trying to find their way in the world. I did find it interesting and improbable that kids would calmly sit in a classroom and interact with their captor. I'm aware of the Stockholm Syndrome (I don't know if I was at 10 years old), but I don't think it plays here.
Eventually, after all the secrets are bared, the students, at Charlie's suggestion, perform their own act of violence and rebellion. Thus endeth the story of Charles Everett Decker, at least within the confines of the book. To be honest, at the age of 10, that was the end of it for me, too. I casually flipped the page and moved on to The Long Walk. Rage was part of my library, but I never really gave it much thought after the initial read. All of the other books in the Bachman Books were more interesting to me.
It wasn't until Columbine that I really chose to reconsider it. By the time the Columbine shootings happened in 1999, King had already asked his publishers to take Rage out of print.
I was aware of other school shootings in the news as I grew up. Columbine seems to be the first one to spark true national attention. Maybe it's because it wasn't a lone crazy shooter situation. Those two assholes worked as a team. It wasn't impulse, it was methodical, and the details that came out in the aftermath horrified us all. For King, there were shootings prior to Columbine that were tied to him. The shooters mentioned Rage as an inspiration, or they were found with copies of it.
I never understood that, any more than I grasped the idea of carrying around a copy of Catcher In The Rye like it was a license to be an asshole. At any rate, King himself had gotten enough bad feelings about the influence of Rage to ask for it to be taken off the shelves. Mind you, and as I've referenced before, I'm known to have multiple copies of the same book. I had two copies of The Bachman Books. Both were paperback and slowly falling apart, but I had them. The Bachman Books collection would continue to be released, but now Rage was not a part of it.
I was 'lucky' enough to find an original version with Rage in Australia.
I paid more for it than should be allowed by law, and I take very good care of it.
Now, as part of this project, I've gone back and read Rage again. At this point, I'm a 36 year old white male with children. I would imagine that my perspective on things has changed since I last read it.
It has. It really has. I find the entire premise implausible. Well, that's maybe not exactly accurate.
Let's say that we're truly in a vacuum. If you take this story as it's written, in 1975, not knowing all of the worldly things we do in 2014, then perhaps it's plausible. It's very difficult to read this and not second-guess everyone's actions and reactions based on the (sadly long) history we have with school shootings, student and adult response, and the media's involvement. It's hard not to think about that. It's hard to accept that, somehow, these kids are going to sit there and feel sympathy for Charlie Decker, especially since he had already assaulted a teacher and had a violent reputation. Charlie Decker is NOT a sympathetic antagonist. He's a character created as an outlet by Stephen King, a young student who had a tough time himself in high school. The sympathetic figures to me are the students who are suddenly ripped from a theoretical world of algebraic variables and thrust into an arena of life or death. Don't get me wrong, they've got blood (well, ink) on their hands, as well.
I can mentally put myself back in high school, and overlay this scenario on my high school experience. I highly doubt that I would find any sympathy for the shooter. I'd be concerned about getting out of there with only the hole in my mouth and the hole in my ass. No bonus holes, thank you. Now, that might seem cowardly to you, and maybe it is. Self-preservation is an instinct, and maybe my life experiences since high school would cause me to react differently today, but as a 17 year old? I'd probably pee my pants. That's my brutal honesty and deep fear for you.
I had written down a bunch of notes while I read the book, things that I thought I might want to address. Now that I'm done reading, they all seem unimportant. Character actions and plot seem secondary. Instead, I'm looking at it, as a whole, through my 36 year old parental eyes. I would be terrified if my children ever found themselves in this situation. In this day and age, we live in a world where kids will go through Active Shooter drills, the same as when we got under our desks to keep ourselves safe from nuclear fallout. Time has moved on, the days are stranger, and Rage is looking more and more like a relic of the past. There are school shootings and post office shootings and disgruntled people in a building shootings far too often. You're not going to sit down and have laughs and share secrets with your captor. Not today. Maybe not back then, either, but certainly not today.
It's funny, because when I sat down to read this book, I was apprehensive about writing my thoughts afterward. I anticipated having so much to write and so much to say that I would lose your interest and maybe my own. I didn't expect to be so underwhelmed by it all. Maybe I romanticized it in my mind because of my long history with the book, the reputation of the book, and the way that Richard Bachman fits into the Stephen King legacy. It's all kind of turned out to be anticlimactic. That's not to say that Rage isn't important. It is, at least it is to me, and it plays heavily into King's legacy, for better or for worse.
Unfortunately, Rage has become a tool for people to wave around when talking about school shootings. While that's valid to a degree, there's certainly more to the story than the violence, and if you get past the implausibility of it all, it's an interesting study in the nature of teenage minds. Fear, peer pressure, social status, relationships with parents and authority figures. Those kinds of issues and themes are timeless, and those continue to translate to the modern era, even if the plot device to get there is unbelievable.
It's a bit of a scary thing when King writes in a way that can allow you to relate to his characters, even the bad guys. At 10, I couldn't relate to Charlie Decker. At 36, I can't relate to Charlie Decker. At 17, I didn't want to shoot up my school, but I knew what it felt like to be an outcast. Not the popular kid with a circle of friends. So, maybe, at 17, I could relate to Charlie Decker more than I'm really comfortable with.
