You begin to cram your fists into your mouth to stifle the screams. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your inner tree of pain. “When you’re five and you hurt, you make a big noise unto the world. Even so, I don’t understand how this book caused so many problems- overall, I found it a pretty mediocre read. I was somewhat put off by the weird and unnecessary sexual turn that basically every one of these conversations took, but it was an interesting look at power dynamics in the school system and I found every character fascinating. Instead, Rage is filled with the conversations between students and teachers that the gunman is able to facilitate. There is surprisingly little killing here for a story that revolves entirely around a teen gunman. This is a bad reason to be interested in a book, but I also just wanted to pick it up because I’m afraid it will become increasingly difficult to find and I didn’t want to end up reading all of King’s works except this one. It’s an out-of-print story about a school shooting that’s caused a lot of real trouble. Rage: This is the story that initially interested me most. Instead of my usual review format to talk about the book as a whole, I’m going to share a bit about each of the four stories before going into general thoughts on the collection.

It took me almost three weeks (more than half of November) to get through this 700 page collection, but it’s finally behind me and I’m ready to reflect on each of the four stories: Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man. At the very end of October, I picked The Bachman Books, a collection of four short novels written by Richard Bachman / Stephen King. I’ve been reading Stephen King since I was twelve years old, but I still have quite a bit of his oeuvre left on my TBR, which includes works by Richard Bachman, an early pseudonym used by King.

Bachman books the long walk