by George Beahm
Several times I’ve gotten his mail and several times he’s gotten mine. He’s at Signet because of me and when the editors got shuffled, things might have gotten confused. Maybe that’s how it got all screwed up and the rumor started.
But I am not—not—Richard Bachman.
—STEPHEN KING, SHAYOL, 1982
Rage (originally titled Getting It On) holds three distinctions: It was King’s first book published under his Bachman pen name. It’s been linked to school shootings, including one that King calls the “Carneal incident.” And, as a result of the “incident,” it’s the only King novel that he deliberately put out of print.
When it was initially released, its publication was not greeted with fanfare because only a handful of people knew Rage was in fact written by Stephen King under a pen name. An inexpensive mass market paperback, Rage went out to drugstores, supermarkets, and other retailers and stayed on the racks for a few weeks; then they were pulled, their covers torn off and submitted for sales credit and their guts pulped.
King’s hope was that he could write under the cover of darkness and avoid detection from his rabid fans, because he wanted to see how successful his novels would be without being attached to a bestselling brand name. It was a forlorn hope kept alive for six years, until the publication of Thinner in 1984, which read more like King than any of the other Bachman books.
Keen-eyed booksellers in the fantasy/sci-fi field, notably Robert Weinberg and L. W. Curry, had already put the word out through their newsletters that King and Bachman were one and the same; they listed Bachman books as “Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman,” based on an educated guess: There was rampant speculation but no incontrovertible proof.
But the smoking gun came when a bookstore clerk in D.C. checked the copyright paperwork filed by King’s agent at the Library of Congress, which requires registration for copyright protection; on the paperwork for Rage, Stephen King was listed as the copyright holder.
The Bangor Daily News broke the story on February 26, 1985. It was headlined with a photo-reproduced header from King’s Castle Rock: The Stephen King Newsletter, cover-dated March 1985. King’s sister-in-law Stephanie Leonard, who doubled as King’s main secretary and editor/publisher of Castle Rock, spilled the beans:
Yes, Stephen King is indeed Richard Bachman. One of the toughest things about doing this newsletter has been that I’ve not been able, until now, to reveal that to the readers. I have known that Stephen was using a pseudonym for years, but I was sworn to secrecy. I am relieved now that I don’t have to lie or be evasive anymore. Last month I hinted that a secret would be revealed, and Stephen intended to keep it quiet until March 1st, but a local newspaper decided they would run the story with or without his comment, as they had enough proof, and as Stephen told them, the whole thing was coming apart—he likened it to having a bag of groceries that gets wet and things keep falling out of the bottom until you can’t hold it together anymore.
At that point, there was no denying the connection, and the media reported the news, setting off a buying frenzy among King fans, who searched out the mass market paperbacks that originally retailed for $1.50 to $2.50. But fans soon learned that of the four other titles, two were out of print.
In retrospect, it was hard to see how the secret could have been kept much longer, given the visibility accorded Thinner by its publisher, who was determined to get Bachman’s sales into high gear: At the Book Expo America in the spring of 1984, where advance review copies of the fall list were freely given out, Thinner was stacked four feet high on two wooden pallets. Jaded booksellers, though, walked by them to get freebie copies of name-brand authors.
As for Thinner’s sales, its first printing was 26,000, but when the news broke about King writing as Bachman, it rocketed up to 280,000. Ironically, a Literary Guild reader wrote the following before the news broke: “This is what King would write like if King could really write.”
Bachman, who died a sudden death, went on to posthumously publish The Regulators and also a “trunk” novel, Blaze, in his introduction (“Full Disclosure”) to which he wrote, “During those years [1966–73] I was actually two men. It was Stephen King who wrote (and sold) horror stories to raunchy skin-mags like Cavalier and Adam, but it was Bachman who wrote a series of novels that didn’t sell to anybody.”
Whether another Bachman book will be published, only time will tell: King’s fabled writer’s trunk is probably empty. King’s books as Bachman include: Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982), The Regulators (1996), and Blaze (2007).
RAGE
Rage, wrote Collings in The Stephen King Companion (1995)
is an extended study in adolescent angst, beginning with its first-person killer/protagonist, Charlie Dekker, and spreading like an infection throughout the high school class he holds hostage. The action is direct and brutal: Dekker meets with the principal for disciplinary action after Dekker nearly killed the shop teacher. He is expelled and told to leave school immediately. He stops at his locker, takes out a pistol, returns to class, shoots the teacher and intimidates the students until it is too late for them to escape. For the next several hours, he invites them to “get it on” with him—to examine their own lives and motives, their frustrations and fears. After systematically making fools of school and police officials, Charlie lets the class go and fakes the police into shooting him.
Compared with It, The Stand, or The Shining, Rage is certainly a weaker novel and a lesser achievement. On its own terms, however, with its narrowly defined characters, perhaps the most limited time span of any King novel or story, strictly focused themes and development, and idiosyncratic narrative voice, it nevertheless manages to hold its own as a document of a past time and as a novel examining ongoing human crises and resolutions.
THE LONG WALK
The Long Walk, dedicated to three of King’s college professors in the English department, was submitted to a Bennett Cerf / Random House first novel competition in 1967, but it was rejected with a form note. As King recalled in “On Becoming a Brand Name”, “I was too crushed to show that book to any publisher in New York.”
A dystopian novel, and an intense study in psychological horror, written when King was in college, the book was inspired by President Kennedy’s popular walkathons, when in 1962 he enjoined the public to take it up: “I would encourage every American to walk as often as possible. It’s more than healthy, it’s fun.”
Not, however, for the young boys in this novel, who give it their best shot.
“I thought of it while hitchhiking home from college one night when I was a freshman,” King told Michael Collings in a letter.
The plot: In a totalitarian America, teenage boys take part in an annual event held on May 1 called “The Long Walk,” in which they must walk from the Maine/Canada border and head south at a predetermined pace (four miles per hour)—or risk being shot, until there’s only one boy standing.
The Long Walk is organized by a mysterious figure known only as “The Major,” who bookends the Long Walk: at the start line, he’s there to encourage a hundred boys and see them off, and he’s also there to congratulate the winner who will receive “The Prize,” which is anything he wishes for the remainder of his life.
ROADWORK
Roadwork is dedicated to the memory of one of King’s teachers, Charlotte Littlefield. Billed by its publisher as “a novel of the first energy crisis,” set in an unnamed Midwest city circa 1973–74, it’s the story of Barton George Dawes, who loses his tenuous grip on reality after his son dies and his marriage disintegrates. On top of that, his house and workplace will literally be demolished when the government makes room for an interstate highway extension.
James Smythe of The Guardian explained:
As with the other early Bachman books, there’s no supernatural menace, no ghosts or possessions. Instead there is something more tangible, yet no less horrifying: cancer. King watched his mother die from it only a year
or so before he wrote Roadwork, and his personal pain is there on every page: in the loss of Fred, the way that Barton can’t forget him, can’t move on past the pain of seeing him suffer before being stripped away. In the first collected editions of the books, King wrote an introduction in which he said that Roadwork was written when he was “grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it.” He says the book is the worst of the Bachmans, simply because it’s “trying to find some answers to the conundrum of human pain.” To my mind, that doesn’t make it a bad book; that makes it a book that strives for something other than scares. It’s trying to fathom exactly what a person goes through; how low they can go when faced with direct loss, and how painful that loss (and its repercussions) can be.
Over time, though, King had a change of heart: In a later edition of the The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King, he wrote an introduction in which he says that Roadwork is “(his) favorite of the early Bachman books.”
THE RUNNING MAN
The Running Man, set in 2025, is, like The Long Walk, a dystopian novel. “Writing it was a fantastic, white-hot experience; this book was written in one month, the bulk of it in the one week of winter vacation,” he wrote in “On Becoming a Brand Name.”
At the time, King was teaching, and used the time during his Christmas break to write this novel with the hope that he could sell it quickly to earn money. He submitted it to Doubleday’s Bill Thompson, who rejected it; he resubmitted it to publisher Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books, who returned it after three weeks with a terse note: “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias.”
As he wrote in “On Becoming a Brand Name,” “The book, unfortunately, was not fantastic.… I was as depressed as I had been over the failure of Book #1. I began to have long talks with myself at night about whether or not I was chasing a fool’s dream.”
The plot: Big business is calling the shots, and Ben Richards, who lives in Co-Op City with his family, whom he is unable to support, is forced to make a drastic decision: He decides to appear for money as a contestant on a game show in which he’s pursued by trained killers, termed “Hunters.” The show is witnessed by millions of TV viewers glued to their sets: It’s the ultimate reality show.
He becomes a man on the run whose covert goal is to destroy the network’s headquarters, to strike a death blow on a pandering organization that feeds on the public’s insatiable desire for bloodlust.
There are 101 chapters, the first titled “Minus 100 and Counting,” as the clock starts ticking downward to its last chapter, “Minus 000 and Counting.”
In 1987, the book was adapted for a motion picture with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role.
PART FOUR
THE
“BESTSELLASAURUS REX”
STOMPS OVER TO NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
I started out as a writer and nothing more. I became a popular writer and have discovered that, in the scale-model landscape of the book business, at least, I have grown into a Bestsellasaurus Rex—a big, stumbling book-beast that is loved when it shits money and hated when it tramples houses. I look back on that sentence and feel an urge to change it because it sounds so self-pitying; I cannot change it because it also conveys my real sense of perplexity and surprise at this absurd turn of events. I started out as a storyteller; along the way I became an economic force, as well.
—Stephen King, “On the Politics of Limiteds,” Castle Rock (June 1985)
25
TURNING THE PAGE:
KING GOES TO NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
No major author likes to change publishing houses because it’s disruptive to everyone in the food chain: the author himself, his publisher, booksellers, distributors, and readers. But sometimes, as King realized, a divorce is the only solution. In hindsight, Doubleday’s decision not to retain King was a major strategic blunder. After all, there are only a handful of superwriters, of which King is one, and they deserve special consideration because they’ve earned it: Their books have built up a ready-made audience over the years that guarantee a profit on every new book. It’s risk-free publishing in an industry fraught with financial risk.
Doubleday maintained that it tried mightily to keep King in-house and made a strong bid for his next three books; they came up with big bucks for King, eclipsed their previous advances for his books, showing a new commitment. But New American Library was determined to snag King, and their $2.5 million offer trumped Doubleday’s, at which point everyone saw the handwriting on the wall. Also, Kirby McCauley’s sale of King’s books earned him a commission of $250,000, which immediately put him in the top league of agents representing major talent.
Doubleday, though, would still benefit from King’s growing audience for many years to come, because its contracts tied up the books’ copyrights for King’s lifetime, and then some years afterward. The irony, though, is that had they kept King happy in the first place, they would have been the publisher of his subsequent books, which now total seventy-four.
Doubleday, of course, marketed King as a horror writer, which handicapped book sales (and movie tickets) by stereotyping him, thus limiting his potential to sell to a larger, mainstream market. In an afterword to Different Seasons, King recounts a conversation he had with Thompson, who explained that he was in danger of being “typed.” As Thompson explained: “First the telekinetic girl, then the vampires, now the haunted hotel and the telepathic kid. You’re gonna get typed.”
King’s response: “That’s okay, Bill. I’ll be a horror writer if that’s what people want. That’s just fine.”
It was certainly fine when King was at Doubleday, but that perception explained why film director Rob Reiner initially downplayed King’s authorship of “The Body,” on which Stand by Me was based: He was concerned that it would scare away viewers unaccustomed to King’s name being attached to what was clearly a nonhorror film.
The problems began when Time magazine’s cover story on King (October 6, 1986) quoted the characterization of his novels proffered in his Different Seasons: “The literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald’s.”
King’s comment provided food for thought and also plenty of ammunition for critics who took the opportunity to lock, load, and fire away at him. They took it to mean that King considered his work to be the equivalent of junk food; in other words, King’s fiction is dismissable.
Many writers in the literary community—writers whose books sold poorly, and who were envious of King’s sales—celebrated his statement with glee. See, I told you so! Straight from the horse’s mouth: King admits he writes junk books! He’s admitted to being a hack!
In Weekly Reader Writing (October 2006), King elaborated, “I’m still paying for that remark. What I meant by it is that I’m tasty and I go down smooth, but I don’t think that a steady diet of Stephen King would make anybody a healthy human being.”
But the damage had been done. Critics, even today, take potshots at King because of that original comment. After all, it’s hard for critics to take your work seriously when it appears you are disparaging your work, even though that was never the intention.
26
THE DEAD ZONE
1979
King’s first book for NAL was, as Collings pointed out in The Stephen King Companion (1995), a good entry point for his new readers. “If one is looking for a starting place in ‘things King,’ The Dead Zone is indeed an ideal choice.”
In The Art of Darkness, Douglas Winter’s interview with King sheds light on the genesis of The Dead Zone. King explained it came out of difficult circumstances. “I had a bad year in 1976—it was a very depressing time.” After two busted attempts at writing new novels, King followed up with “a trial cut on The Dead Zone. It was a small-town story about a child-killer.”
In The Dead Zone, a freak accident suffered by Johnny Smith has a side benefit (or drawback, depending on your thinking): He now has a “wild” talent, precognition: the ability to
see into the future. But when he sees what will happen if presidential candidate Greg Stillson gets elected, his hand is forced: He decides his mission in life is to stop Stillson, no matter what the cost.
A first-rate suspense novel that saw a faithful translation to the big screen, Collings points out that
Throughout, King preserves a sense of balance in treatment. Johnny Smith is a quiet, reserved character who merits a quiet, reserved novel—and for the most part, this is what King provides (this characterization is brilliantly retained in David Cronenberg’s film version, with Christopher Walken capturing the essence both of character and of story).
It also marked a major change in how King’s books were designed. They now had a more mainstream look, flensed of designs that screamed “horror!” As King explained:
I like books that are nicely made, and with the exception of ’Salem’s Lot and Night Shift, none of the Doubleday books were especially well made. They have a ragged, machine-produced look to them, as though they were built to fall apart. The Stand [1978 edition] is worse that way: It looks like a brick. It’s this little, tiny squatty thing that looks much bigger than it is.
The Dead Zone is really nicely put together. It’s got a nice cloth binding, and it’s just a nice product.
In The Stephen King Companion (1995), Michael Collings wrote:
As to where to start if one has never read a King novel, The Dead Zone comes almost immediately to mind as one of King’s most restrained and controlled, mostly nearly mainstream, and least “horrific” novels, especially among those published during his first decade as a writer.
