The Bachman Books
Stephen King
Why I Was Bachman
1
Between 1977 and 1984, I published five novels under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. These were Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), The Running Man (1982), and Thinner (1984). There were two reasons I was finally linked with Bachman: first, because the first four books, all paperback originals, were dedicated to people associated with my life, and second, because my name appeared on the copyright forms of one book. Now people are asking me why I did it, and I don’t seem to have any very satisfactory answers. Good thing I didn’t murder anyone, isn’t it?
2
I can make a few suggestions, but that’s all. The only important thing I ever did in my life for a conscious reason was to ask Tabitha Spruce, the college co-ed I was seeing, if she would marry me. The reason was that I was deeply in love with her. The joke is that love itself is an irrational and indefinable emotion.
Sometimes something just says Do this or Don’t do that. I almost always obey that voice, and when I disobey it I usually rue the day. All I’m saying is that I’ve got a hunch-player’s approach to life. My wife accuses me of being an impossibly picky Virgo and I guess I am in some ways-I usually know at any given time how many pieces of a 500-piece puzzle I’ve put in, for instance-but I never really planned anything big that I ever did, and that includes the books I’ve written. I never sat down and wrote page one with anything but the vaguest idea of how things would come out.
One day it occurred to me that I ought to publish Getting It On, a novel which Doubleday almost published two years before they published Carrie, under a pseudonym. It seemed like a good idea so I did it.
Like I say, good thing I didn’t kill anybody, huh?
3
In 1968 or 1969, Paul McCartney said a wistful and startling thing in an interview. He said the Beatles had discussed the idea of going out on the road as a bar-band named Randy and the Rockets. They would wear hokey capes and masks a la Count Five, he 1
said, so no one would recognize them, and they would just have a raveup like in the old days.
When the interviewer suggested they would be recognized by their voices, Paul seemed at first startled . . . and then a bit appalled.
4
Cub Koda, possibly America’s greatest houserocker, once told me this story about Elvis Presley, and like the man said, if it ain’t true, it oughtta be. Cub said Elvis told an interviewer something that went like this: I was like a cow in a pen with a whole bunch of other cows, only I got out somehow. Well, they came and got me and put me in another pen, only this one was bigger and I had it all to myself. I looked around and seen the fences was so high I’d never get out. So I said, “All right, I’ll graze. ”
5
I wrote five novels before Carrie. Two of them were bad, one was indifferent, and I thought two of them were pretty good. The two good ones were Getting It On (which became Rage when it was finally published) and The Long Walk. Getting It On was begun in 1966, when I was a senior in high school. I later found it moldering away in an old box in the cellar of the house where I’d grown up-this rediscovery was in 1970, and I finished the novel in 1971. The Long Walk was written in the fall of 1966 and the spring of 1967, when I was a freshman at college.
I submitted Walk to the Bennett Cerf/Random House first-novel competition (which has, I think, long since gone the way of the blue suede shoe) in the fall of 1967 and it was promptly rejected with a form note . . . no comment of any kind. Hurt and depressed, sure that the book must really be terrible, I stuck it into the fabled TRUNK, which all novelists, both published and aspiring, carry around. I never submitted it again until Elaine Geiger at New American Library asked if “Dicky” (as we called him) was going to follow up Rage. The Long Walk went in the TRUNK, but as Bob Dylan says in “Tangled Up in Blue,” it never escaped my mind.
None of them has ever escaped my mind-not even the really bad ones.
6
The numbers have gotten very big. That’s part of it. I have times when I feel as if I planted a modest packet of words and grew some kind of magic beanstalk . . .or a runaway garden of books (OVER 40 MILLION KING BOOKS IN PRINT!!!, as my publisher likes to trumpet). Or, put it another way-sometimes I feel like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia. I knew enough to get the brooms started, but once they start to march, things are never the same.
Am I bitching? No. At least they’re very gentle bitches if I am. I have tried my best to 2
follow that other Dylan’s advice and sing in my chains like the sea. I mean, I could get down there in the amen corner and crybaby about how tough it is to be Stephen King, but somehow I don’t think all those people out there who are a) unemployed or b) busting heavies every week just to keep even with the house payments and the MasterCharge bill would feel a lot of sympathy for me. Nor would I expect it. I’m still married to the same woman, my kids are healthy and bright, and I’m being well paid for doing something I love. So what’s to bitch about?
Nothing.
Almost.
7
Memo to Paul McCartney, if he’s there: the interviewer was right. They would have recognized your voices, but before you even opened your mouths, they would have recognized George’s guitar licks. I did five books as Randy and the Rockets and I’ve been getting letters asking me if I was Richard Bachman from the very beginning.
My response to this was simplicity itself: I lied.
8
I think I did it to turn the heat down a little bit; to do something as someone other than Stephen King. I think that all novelists are inveterate role-players and it was fun to be someone else for a while-in this case, Richard Bachman. And he did develop a personality and a history to go along with the bogus author photo on the back of Thinner and the bogus wife (Claudia Inez Bachman) to whom the book is dedicated. Bachman was a fairly unpleasant fellow who was born in New York and spent about ten years in the merchant marine after four years in the Coast Guard. He ultimately settled in rural central New Hampshire, where he wrote at night and tended to his medium-sized dairy farm during the day. The Bachmans had one child, a boy, who died in an unfortunate accident at the age of six (he fell through a well cover and drowned). Three years ago a brain tumor was discovered near the base of Bachman’s brain; tricky surgery removed it.
And he died suddenly in February of 1985 when the Bangor Daily News, my hometown paper, published the story that I was Bachman-a story which I confirmed. Sometimes it was fun to be Bachman, a curmudgeonly recluse a la J. D. Salinger, who never gave interviews and who, on the author questionnaire from New English Library in London, wrote down “rooster worship” in the blank provided for religion.
I’ve been asked several times if I did it because I thought I was overpublishing the market as Stephen King. The answer is no. I didn’t think I was overpublishing the market . . . but my publishers did. Bachman provided a compromise for both of us. My “Stephen King publishers” were like a frigid wifey who only wants to put out once or twice a year, encouraging her endlessly horny hubby to find a call girl. Bachman was where I went when I had to have relief. This does nothing, however, to explain why I’ve felt this restless need to publish what I write when I don’t need the dough.
I repeat, good thing I didn’t kill someone, huh?
3
10
I’ve been asked several times if I did it because I feel typecast as a horror writer. The answer is no. I don’t give a shit what people call me as long as I can go to sleep at night.
Nevertheless, only the last of the Bachman books is an out-and-out horror story, and the fact hasn’t escaped me. Writing something that was not horror as Stephen King would be perfectly easy, but answering the questions about why I did it would be a pain in the ass.