StephenKings Rage

Stephen King is a well-known author of horror fiction. He maintains that he writes horror because:

The horror writer always brings bad news: you’re going to die, he says; he’s telling you to never mind Oral Roberts and his “something good is going to happen to you,” because something bad is going to happen to you and it may be cancer and it may be a stroke, and it may be a car accident, but it’s going to happen. (qtd. in Magistrale 24)

The bad news is that there have been “nine deadly school shootings in the U.S. during the past three years” (Lloyd 7). Society has been plagued with excessive violence. This behavior has caused many misguided children to fight in school, disrupt a teacher’s lesson, disrespect figures of authority in and out of school, commit suicide, and carry guns as a way of controlling situations. The violent events that have occurred in American schools are similar to the rage expressed in Stephen King’s novel, Rage, which was written over thirty years ago.

Rage, which was published in 1977, “highlights the isolation, fear, and pressures implicit in high school society...” (Collings 14). King did not use his real name when he published Rage. As a matter of fact, “during the summer of 1966, after graduating from high school, King started writing “Getting It On,” which he later published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman as Rage (Russell 4).

Rage is about Charlie Decker, a high school outcast who, “spreads sufficient destruction (physical and psychical) with only a pistol” (Collings 14). Charlie wasn’t always an outcast; he became an outcast after, “almost [killing] Mr. Carlson,” his chemistry teacher (King 114). Charlie tried to kill Mr. Carlson because; “when Carlson called [him] up to do a problem on the board...he started to make fun of [him] (King 115). He was tired of being ridiculed by Mr. Carlson so he began to hit the black board with a pipe wrench he had hidden in his back pocket. When Mr. Carlson tried to grab Charlie, “[he] turned around and hit him” (116).

Mr. Carlson didn’t die, although he did suffer from “a hairline fracture just above the frontal lobe” and four splinters of bone were picked out of his brain (116). Charlie never saw the pipe that he used to hit Mr. Carlson again, but he didn’t care because“[he] didn’t need that anymore, …that stick wasn’t big enough.