April 2010's SK Flavor of the Month - The Bachman Books, Rage and The Long Walk

Okay, I intended to post an April first thread titled "April 2010's SK Flavor of the Month - The Poky Little Puppy". But aside from the funny thread title I couldn't think of enough phony stuff to fill out a post. I shouldn't write this stuff right before I go to bed...

I've already read Rage and am halfway through The Long Walk - I don't know about The Poky Little Puppy (I'm assuming it's optional) :)

Rage - struck me as being like a cross between The Breakfast Club and Lord of the Flies. It was interesting, easy to read, with interesting characters and good dialogue. The motivations and reactions of the characters weren't always believable - now if nobody had been really harmed, if the authorities had been led to believe someone had been shot but the kids knew otherwise (say, if the teacher had been shot AT, tied up and gagged, and only Ted could believe that Charlie would actually use the gun on anyone), and if Ted had been reduced to tears rather than left catatonic, it would have worked, I think. A lot of that had to do with it being such an early story. King paints a great picture of high school insecurities and gets the banter between the kids just right, but he gets over-ambitious about what he can do with the story and where he can take it in my opinion. Shame King didn't dig the story out as a more mature writer and improve it, but I can't say I didn't enjoy it. Can't say it wasn't flawed, either.

The Long Walk - so far I'm really enjoying it. I can't fault it. The characters are great, the boys in this are as strong as the ones in The Body, and King makes this believable, compelling, interesting and hard to put down. There is the right amount of tension and I am looking forward to seeing how each individual boy is going to cope with the ordeal. As an idea it reminded me of William Styron's The Long March, which I found really dull. This works much better for me.

I've just started Rage. I've finished the chapter where he talks about going camping with his dad.

He was right in his introduction, that was pretty Freudian. But then I remember reading somewhere that even though in reality Freud's hypothesis were questionable, they work very well for literature.

Something else to think about: Rage is (as far as I know) the only Stephen King fiction book to have gone out of print. In fact, the reason they don't sell The Bachman Books omnibus is that King pulled Rage from publication after the rash of school shootings a few years back.

I think that was unnecessary, but I can't blame him for it. Though I think his book was harmless, I imagine it must have just been uncomfortable on a personal level.

I read about Rage being pulled and thought about the end of Danse Macabre ('The Last Waltz'?). Wanting to know a bit more about why he felt the need to pull the story, I read this where he discusses the issue:

http://www.horrorking.com/interview7.html

I was particularly struck by the following:

"Rage had been mentioned in at least one other school shooting, and in the wake of that one an FBI agent asked if he could interview me on the subject, with an eye to setting up a computer profile that would help identify potentially dangerous adolescents."

That's heavy, and I think I would have pulled it too.

Well, past a certain point I couldn't put The Long Walk down. And also, past a certain point, I didn't want anyone to die. I was following those boys the whole way through and by the end had invested more emotionally than in any other King work I've read so far. It was harrowing and believable right through to the very end, scarily so when you think of those POW death marches. You couldn't help but think of the utter futility of young men going off to war. I honestly think this is the best thing I've read of King's so far, and surprisingly it's as early as Rage, which was quite naive in many ways. The ending was very powerful with none of King's need to over-explain or tie up loose ends.

Not sure how it's thought of in general but for me... wow.

I'm in about the middle of Rage. Irma and... I forget her name just had a slap fight.

Can I just say that Charlie is a pretty irritating character? I know it's wrong, but I'm rooting for a sniper to take him out.

Yeah, I wasn't sure where my sympathies were supposed to lay. I felt like I was supposed to be rooting for Charlie, but I found myself sympathising much more with Ted, who was the only one who seemed to keep his head and do the right thing.

I found myself sympathising much more with Ted

Amen!

I can't say Rage is one of my favourite SK books but The Long Walk certainly is and it is so great to read other positive comments about it because it seems to me to be a book that has been sadly neglected. Don't get me wrong here - if I didn't love King's supernatural books I wouldn't be a fan; there wouldn't be much point - but I do think the ones where he doesn't rely on supernatural characters and events are the ones that prove what a great writer he really can be: I'm talking about Shawshank Redemption, The Body, The Last Rung on the Ladder and others of that kind. In my opinion, The Long Walk is up there with all of those. Yes, it's about the future, but it's mainly about the characters of its subjects and the things people will do to escape poverty and King actually does character and social commentary extremely well and The Long Walk is one of my favourites of all his books. It was one that was very hard indeed to get out of my mind after I read it for the first time - and one I have reread many times since.

>8 jseger9000::
Also loved the way the head and the police chief were obviously biting their tongues and having a hard time doing it while talking to Charlie.

>9 Booksloth::
Booksloth, I'm still mulling over The Long Walk now. It has so many layers of meaning, all the while being, on the surface, a very simple story.

It's King's best so far, and probably one of the best things I've read. I don't know why it isn't more famous. It's right up there with the greats of social commentary and dystopian fiction, like 1984 and The Lord of the Flies. I'm still stunned by it.

#10 So good to hear! Every good word about that story is like nectar to me! As you say - so much more to it than just a bunch of guys on a walk.

Okay, so at the end of Rage, what do you think that Pig Pen and Dick Keene got up to at the end?

I will say they became a gay couple because it makes me happy to think so. But I don't remember anything within the book indicating anything except that Pig Pen hated his mother (or his muddah. A couple of those accents were pretty of overdone). I don't even remember who Dick Keene was...

#12 What does being gay have to do with hating his mother?

What does being gay have to do with hating his mother?

Nothing at all.

I was just guessing at what happened with those two characters. Since they were mentioned together and what they did was censored, I was just guessing.

Maybe they committed some violent act or something, but the person writing the letter didn't seem to imply by tone that it was something terrible. So I was hoping that whatever they did that got them mentioned in the letter was something noteworthy, but wasn't something bad.

The thing about Pig Pen hating his mother and breaking pencils is really the only thing I remember about that character. And I don't remember anything about Dick Keene at all. Did he do anything besides snicker in the back of class?

Who was the other student who did something that was censored? A day after reading the book, the students are sort of running together except for Irma and Ted...

I just think the glimpses into the students' lives implied that the after-effects of the incident had a lasting effect on them all - Pig Pen and Dick doing something gossip-worthy, one of the girls mooching about with no sense of direction - and because that was the main point I didn't really dwell on exactly what it was they'd done. Nothing obvious suggested itself from the story but it was apparent that they'd done something they might not have had the courage to do otherwise.

You know what's funny is that I'd always figured that Rage would be the Bachman book that was 'worth reading' (and it is the only one I had read prior to this month) because of its notorious reputation if nothing else.

And yet less than a hundred pages into The Long Walk it has blown Rage to pieces.

I'd kind of figured that the Bachman books would all be sub par since they were early novels and ones he didn't publish under his own name.

Rage sort of bore that opinion out. Yet all of a sudden, here is The Long Walk a gem of a novel that is mostly overlooked.

That's exactly what I felt, jseger. Can't wait for you to finish The Long Walk. If a more 'serious' author had written it, I don't think it would be overlooked at all, quite the opposite in fact.

Just finished Rage.

While it had some parts I liked, it felt way too unrealistic. That just didn't seem to be the way the kids would have acted in the situation. Maybe if he just sort of took the room hostage, but not after he had killed two people in front of them.

Looking forward to The Long Walk considering all the good things that have been said about it thus far.

Maybe if he just sort of took the room hostage, but not after he had killed two people in front of them.

Yeah, that's what bothered me too. I mean, I could never forget that there was a corpse right there in the room with them, copious amounts of blood and gore on the floor. I couldn't imagine the students being so nonchalant with that constant reminder.

The Long Walk is much better. I haven't been posting about it much because there's not much to it. Even saying where I am is difficult, because the scenery rarely changes. He is excellent not just in detailing the constant tension of literally being followed by your would be killers, but in describing all the microscopic, miserable little details of their death march. You feel like you are marching with them.

It's very similar to a book I just finished recently, Battle Royale. It is leagues better in quality though. Battle Royale was trashy pulp trying to defend itself by pretending to be something more. The Long Walk is something more, disguised as trashy pulp.

I both started and finished The Long Walk today. Great stuff, couldn't put it down. This would be another one of the books I would suggest to people who aren't horror fans so they automatically write King off as an author they wouldn't like. I usually tell those people to read The Running Man (another book I read in one day) and I liked this one almost as much as that.

The way he made you attached to the majority of the kids in the competition (despite only focusing heavily on about 5 of them) was extremely well done. You just feel horrible about the way these kids are dying and you wish there was some way they could all get out of it, but you know it's just not going to happen.

It wasn't perfect but it's one of my favorite King novels of the 27 or so that I've read.

>19 jseger9000::
I was describing The Long Walk to a friend and he said that it sounded like Battle Royale.

>19 jseger9000: and 20:
I also liked the little details about the crowd, how they were talked about by the competitors at first and how the competitors noticed them less as they went on. You got a very vivid picture of the crowd whenever they were mentioned, for example:

"He waved at a group of little girls who were going through a spastic cheerleader routine, pleated skirts and scabbed knees flying."

And that's it. One sentence, but it's a great image. The sort of thing that can be seen in any school playground, and believe me, the sort of little girls who break out in routines at the drop of a hat would probably continue during a hanging unless told off, they are that oblivious, self-absorbed and excited while doing their routines.

I stayed up last night polishing off The Long Walk. Despair really settles over the last bunch of chapters, doesn't it?

I was half expecting King to wrap up the novel before declaring a 'winner' leaving those last few on their individual roads to Hell forever.

Just finished "Rage," and I love your comment Moomin that it was like "The Breakfast Club." That's just what I thought as I was reading it, a warped version of "The Breakfast Club." I agree with everyone else too, it was way too unrealistic. I think after Charlie shot Mrs. Underwood only one kid screamed and everyone else just sat there--Ted was the only one who had a "typical" reaction throughout I thought. But that being said, I did find it very readable and I was interested enough to keep going, just won't be one of my favorites.

And I managed to read a couple pages of "The Long Walk" this morning and so far I'm intrigued. I'm glad everyone's given such positive comments.

I felt the same way about Rage. A twisted Breakfast Club is a wonderful description.

I'm loving The Long Walk. The characters are gripping and the tension is mounting. I find myself hoping that the boys do OK even though you think you know how it turns out!

>22 jseger9000::
The last few chapters were pretty hard going (emotionally, not because of the writing). Don't know why but I thought you'd have more to say about it! Maybe I thought everyone would be raving about it like I did.

>23 LibraryLover23: & 24:
I had a read through the Amazon reviews and we're not the only ones who thought that, it does get a mention.

>25 cal8769::
Cal, I felt exactly the same, I was rooting for the boys all the way through.