A lesser-known book from
the master storyteller Stephen King is the focus of today's post but it's a good story all the same.
Rage is a book about a young man – Charlie – who has issues, but the issues he has are as much a
mystery to him as they are to others. Sometimes he feels sad, sometimes angry,
sometimes he just feels terribly confused and does stuff for reasons he cannot
explain.
The majority of this book takes place in a classroom at Charlie’s high school, where he has shot dead a teacher locked the door and holds his fellow classmates hostage. Whilst we sit with him and his fellow pupils, we go back to when he was younger, when he smashed all the windows around his house, and we hear from some of the other kids too, about what it was like for them when shit happened, and in spite of the fact that this book was written in the seventies, it reminded me a bit, in its tone and subject matter (teen angst, mental health issues, etc) of a John Green novel. (Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska).
Charlie isn’t the only one with issues either. A popular girl who’s been going steady with a boy for a while admits that she's still a virgin, prompting Charlie to recants the story of when he nearly lost his virginity on a beach the year before but, in the end, wasn't up to the task. This in turn opens the door to other confessions, and before you know it, what you thought was a book about murder and insanity, becomes a book about life and how our perception of people, our prejudices, because of how a person looks, their gender, sexuality, colour or creed, is founded on the false persona that we show the world, when in reality we're completely different and screaming inside, and I liked it for that.
Rage is a short book, and combined with the excellent writing it won’t take you long to read, so grab a copy if you can (you may have to look under Richard Bachman, King’s pseudonym in the seventies and eighties to find it) but it seems that as time goes by, more and more of these older books are being re-released as King novels and based on this novella, the quicker that happens the better.
Three stars for this little gem then and on to The Running Man.
The majority of this book takes place in a classroom at Charlie’s high school, where he has shot dead a teacher locked the door and holds his fellow classmates hostage. Whilst we sit with him and his fellow pupils, we go back to when he was younger, when he smashed all the windows around his house, and we hear from some of the other kids too, about what it was like for them when shit happened, and in spite of the fact that this book was written in the seventies, it reminded me a bit, in its tone and subject matter (teen angst, mental health issues, etc) of a John Green novel. (Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska).
Charlie isn’t the only one with issues either. A popular girl who’s been going steady with a boy for a while admits that she's still a virgin, prompting Charlie to recants the story of when he nearly lost his virginity on a beach the year before but, in the end, wasn't up to the task. This in turn opens the door to other confessions, and before you know it, what you thought was a book about murder and insanity, becomes a book about life and how our perception of people, our prejudices, because of how a person looks, their gender, sexuality, colour or creed, is founded on the false persona that we show the world, when in reality we're completely different and screaming inside, and I liked it for that.
Rage is a short book, and combined with the excellent writing it won’t take you long to read, so grab a copy if you can (you may have to look under Richard Bachman, King’s pseudonym in the seventies and eighties to find it) but it seems that as time goes by, more and more of these older books are being re-released as King novels and based on this novella, the quicker that happens the better.
Three stars for this little gem then and on to The Running Man.
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