Synopsis: A disturbed high-school student with authority problems kills one of his teachers and takes the rest of his class hostage. Over the course of one long, tense and unbearable hot afternoon, Charlie Decker explains what led him to this drastic sequence of events, while at the same time deconstructing the personalities of his classmates, forcing each one to justify his or her existence.
Rage is the fourth work of Stephen King and the first time that he published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. No one caught on that Bachman was actually King until around his fourth book under the fake name which was the novel, The Running Man. It took me quite a while to find my copy which has all four of the original Bachman books in one, but when I did, I was stoked. King went on to write a few more books under his pseudonym even after it was out that he and Bachman were one in the same. He explains in my copy that he doesn’t really have a good reason for why he decided to publish under a different name other than just to get some of his stories out that didn’t quite fall under the normal Stephen King books people were used to him writing.
When I first started reading Rage and realized that our main character Charlie Decker was a very disturbed kid that was about to take hostages and start shooting up the school, I was hooked. Not because the idea of that plot seemed fun or exciting, but because its relatable to the times we’re living in now with school shootings being such a regular occurrence. Having a younger brother and sister that just graduated High School this past year, events like this have been a huge deal for me and my family. My siblings were in school when most of the major shootings took place. It was a very scary few years being the worrying older brother when I would see the news reports and not know if they were okay or not. So for me, this book had its hooks in me rather quickly. But… just as fast as it had intrigued me, I lost interest at about the same speed. It has such a strong and mysterious beginning! But once Charlie has murdered a couple of teachers and finally settles in to his spot sitting at the desk of his now dead instructor, the story for me took a nosedive. No matter how hard I tried, I could just never take his reasons for what he was doing seriously. He not only takes the classroom hostage while parents, police and news reporters huddle outside of the school waiting it all out, but he then begins to try and mentally break down his fellow student body at gun point.
It strays from where it starts and goes into this holier than thou rant which ends up getting these kids to see things from Charlie’s perspective. I think what bugged me so much was that the kids (hostages) lost their fear of him so fast and it took no effort at all for them to have this almost Stockholm Syndrome going on. They all start to talk about the things that make them angry about their parents, teachers and lives in general. all building up this enormous ball of “rage” and coming together over it. This story falls to the very bottom of my list so far. It just didn’t do anything for me like I thought it was originally going to. There aren’t any film adaptations of Rage as of yet. King wrote this in 1965 when he was still in high school himself but didn’t have it published until much later. I’ve read that he doesn’t even see it as a good work of literature himself due to his age when he wrote it. S.K. actually had Rage pulled from publishing in the late 90’s due to him fearing it was having a hand in the school shootings that were happening then. There were four specific instances in 1988, 1989, 1996 and 1997 where the students accused of school shootings said they had gotten the idea from reading Rage and was trying to reenact the book. In the 1997 case, a copy of Rage was actually found in the students locker after he had been arrested. Today, Rage is ranked as the #2 Most Sought After Out-Of-Print books and the surviving copies that are still hanging around run anywhere from $500 to $5,000. Don’t believe me? check Amazon and EBay yourself. I couldn’t believe it either until I saw it with my own eyes. So for this one I sadly have to give it a 1.5 out of 5 stars. I had much higher hopes for it personally. But maybe you would like it more than I did! The next novel up for review is the beast of a book and my second favorite so far… The Stand! Stephen King’s massive epic following two separate groups trying to survive the apocalypse accidentally caused by our very own Government. Full of horror, The Shine, death and demons. Get ready for one hell of an adventure! Please leave your thoughts and comments below and until next time, happy reading! 
Keys to the Kingdom 