Just finished Rage. Some thoughts.
Now like most, my main reason to purchase this edition of the Bachman Books was to be able to read a physical copy of Rage. The elusive and mythical, fascinating aura of "the forbidden" surrounds it, which didn't necessarily raise my expectations so high they couldn't be met, but I at least expected something very dark and "special" so to say.
I didn't get that. All in all I'd rate the book 3/5, it was fine and that's it. But what I got wasn't a completely deranged kid, slaughtering his way through school, living out some inhumane fantasies like forcing other hostages to kill or torture eachother while captive to play some kind of survivor games, rape some chick in front of class he's always wanted to have or whatever, there's many things I could think of that would actually justify the reputation of the book, but at the end of the day Charlie "just" killed two teachers, tell the class cliche stories about his abusive father, being beaten up and bullied, failing to get a hard on when a girl wanted to fuck (which I'm aware are probably realistic motives for traumatized school shooters, but reality often isn't all that interesting) and then made the other students tell some embarrassing secrets and at the end have them humiliate the popular kid.
I can understand to a degree why King ain't happy with the book, first and foremost I wouldn't be happy with it because it's so banal) and how it bothers him that it was in the possession of some school shooters, but it just kinda rubs me the wrong way he let it go out of print. Heavy Metal bands didn't pull their records from shelves, movies haven't been taken from stores and video games didn't stop being published - all sources accused or quoted to be inspiration to some shooters. Maybe I'm just annoyed that this mid book is just hard to get in physical form. But I just don't like art being published and then pulled, no matter how mediocre it may be, it was created, it was released and in my ethos that means it belongs to the world and has to stay.
Anyway just my two cents, on to The Long Walk.