When I wrote straight fiction as Richard Bachman, no one asked the questions. In fact, ha-ha, hardly anyone read the books.
Which leads us to what might be-well, not the reason why that voice spoke up in the first place, but the closest thing to it.
11
You try to make sense of your life. Everybody tries to do that, I think, and part of making sense of things is trying to find reasons . . . or constants . . . things that don’t fluctuate.
Everyone does it, but perhaps people who have extraordinarily lucky or unlucky lives do it a little more. Part of you wants to think-or must as least speculatethat you got whopped with the cancer stick because you were one of the bad guys (or one of the good ones, if you believe Durocher’s Law). Part of you wants to think that you must have been one hardworking S.O.B. or a real prince or maybe even one of the Sainted Multitude if you end up riding high in a world where people are starving, shooting each other, burning out, bumming out, getting loaded, getting ‘Luded.
But there’s another part that suggests it’s all a lottery, a real-life game-show not much different from “Wheel of Fortune” or “The New Price Is Right” (two of the Bachman books, incidentally, are about game-show-type competitions). It is for some reason depressing to think it was all-or even mostly-an accident. So maybe you try to find out if you could do it again.
Or in my case, if Bachman could do it again.
12
The question remains unanswered. Richard Bachman’s first four books did not sell well at all, perhaps partly because they were issued without fanfare.
Each month paperback houses issue three types of books: “leaders,” which are heavily advertised, stocked in dump-bins (the trade term for those showy cardboard displays you see at the front of your local chain bookstore), and which usually feature fancy covers that have been either die-cut or stamped with foil;” subleaders, ” which are less heavily advertised, less apt to be awarded dump-bins, and less expected to sell millions of copies (two hundred thousand copies sold would be one hell of a good showing for a sub-leader); and just plain books. This third category is the paperback book publishing world’s equivalent of trench warfare or … cannon fodder. “Just plain books” (the only 4
other term I can think of is sub-sub-leaders, but that is really depressing) are rarely hardcover reprints; they are generally backlist books with new covers, genre novels (gothics, Regency romances, westerns, and so on), or series books such as The Survivalist, The Mercenaries, The Sexual Adventures of a Horny Pumpkin . . . you get the idea. And, every now and then, you find genuine novels buried in this deep substratum, and the Bachman novels are not the only time such novels have been the work of well-known writers sending out dispatches from deep cover. Donald Westlake published paperback originals under the names Tucker Coe and Richard Stark; Evan Hunter under the name Ed McBain; Gore Vidal under the name Edgar Box. More recently Gordon Lish published an excellent, eerie paperback original called The Stone Boy under a pseudonym.
The Bachman novels were “just plain books,” paperbacks to fill the drugstore and bus-station racks of America. This was at my request; I wanted Bachman to keep a low profile. So, in that sense, the poor guy had the dice loaded against him from the start.
And yet, little by little, Bachman gained a dim cult following. His final book, Thinner, had sold about 28,000 copies in hardcover before a Washington bookstore clerk and writer named Steve Brown got suspicious, went to the Library of Congress, and uncovered my name on one of the Bachman copyright forms. Twenty-eight thousand copies isn’t a lot-it’s certainly not in best-seller territory-but it’s 4,000 copies more than my book Night Shift sold in 1978. I had intended Bachman to follow Thinner with a rather gruesome suspense novel called Misery, and I think that one might have taken
“Dicky” onto the best-seller lists. Of course we’ll never know now, will we? Richard Bachman, who survived the brain tumor, finally died of a much rarer disease-cancer of the pseudonym. He died with that question-is it work that takes you to the top or is it all just a lottery? -still unanswered.
But the fact that Thinner did 28,000 copies when Bachman was the author and 280,000
copies when Steve King became the author, might tell you something, huh?
13
There is a stigma attached to the idea of the pen name. This was not so in the past; there was a time when the writing of novels was believed to be a rather low occupation, perhaps more vice than profession, and a pen name thus seemed a perfectly natural and respectable way of protecting one’s self (and one’s relatives) from embarrassment. As respect for the art of the novel rose, things changed. Both critics and general readers became suspicious of work done by men and women who elected to hide their identities.
If it was good, the unspoken opinion seems to run, the guy would have put his real name on it. If he lied about his name, the book must suck like an Electrolux.
So I want to close by saying just a few words about the worth of these books. Are they good novels? I don’t know. Are they honest novels? Yes, I think so. They were honestly meant, anyway, and written with an energy I can only dream about these days (The Running Man, for instance, was written during a period of seventy-two hours and published with virtually no changes). Do they suck like an Electrolux? Overall, no. In places . . . wellll . . .
5
I was not quite young enough when these stories were written to be able to dismiss them as juvenilia. On the other hand, I was still callow enough to believe in oversimple motivations (many of them painfully Freudian) and unhappy endings. The most recent of the Bachman books offered here, Roadwork, was written between ‘Salem’s Lot and The Shining, and was an effort to write a “straight” novel. (I was also young enough in those days to worry about that casual cocktail-party question, “Yes, but when are you going to do something serious? “) I think it was also an effort to make some sense of my mother’s painful death the year before — a lingering cancer had taken her off inch by painful inch.
Following this death I was left both grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it all. I suspect Roadwork is probably the worst of the lot simply because it tries so hard to be good and to find some answers to the conundrum of human pain.
The reverse of this is The Running Man, which may be the best of them because it’s nothing but story-it moves with the goofy speed of a silent movie, and anything which is not story is cheerfully thrown over the side.
Both The Long Walk and Rage are full of windy psychological preachments (both textual and subtextual), but there’s still a lot of story in those novels-ultimately the reader will be better equipped than the writer to decide if the story is enough to surmount all the failures of perception and motivation.
I’d only add that two of these novels, perhaps even all four, might have been published under my own name if I had been a little more savvy about the publishing business or if I hadn’t been preoccupied in the years they were written with first trying to get myself through school and then to support my family. And that I only published them (and am allowing them to be republished now) because they are still my friends; they are undoubtedly maimed in some ways, but they still seem very much alive to me.
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And a few words of thanks: to Elaine Koster, NAL’s publisher (who was Elaine Geiger when these books were first published), who kept “Dicky’s” secret so long and successfully to Carolyn Stromberg, “Dicky’s” first editor, who did the same; to Kirby McCauley, who sold the rights and also kept the secret faithfully and well; to my wife, who encouraged me with these just as she did with the others that fumed out to be such big and glittery money-makers; and, as always, to you, reader, for your patience and kindness.
Stephen King
Bangor, Maine
6
RAGE
Richard Bachman
[24 mar 2001 – scanned for #bookz, proofread and released – v1]
A high school Show-and-Tell session explodes into a nightmare of evil…
So you understand that when we
increase the number of variables,
the axioms themselves never change.
-Mrs. Jean Underwood
Teacher, teacher, ring the bell,
My lessons all to you I’ll tell,
And when my day at school is through,
I’ll know more than aught I knew.