I want to be upfront about something before this review goes any further. Rage is a book that Stephen King himself decided should no longer exist in the world, at least not in any accessible form. He pulled it from print voluntarily after a series of real school shootings in the 1980s and 1990s, some of which involved perpetrators who had read it. He wrote later that the book was out of print and that was a good thing. That decision deserves serious respect. It was not made lightly by a man who has spent his career defending the value of dark fiction, and the fact that he arrived at it anyway tells you something about how seriously he took the responsibility.
With that said, Rage exists. It was written. It is in libraries. People read it and discuss it. And a review of it is not endorsement of school violence any more than a review of Crime and Punishment is endorsement of murder. So here is what it actually is, read as a piece of writing with the full weight of its context acknowledged.
The book also has real problems. The ending is rushed and not entirely convincing. Some of the supporting students are thinly drawn. And the central act of violence, while narrated with deliberate casualness rather than glorification, is still a piece of fiction that portrays a school shooter in a sympathetic first-person voice, which is why King eventually decided it had no right to keep circulating. That decision was correct. But the writing is real, and dismissing the book entirely because of what it was associated with does not quite account for what it actually is.
King wrote the original draft of Rage as a teenager, under the title Getting It On, and it shows in ways that are both interesting and occasionally rough. It is the most personal of the Bachman novels, the one most visibly written from the inside of an adolescent experience rather than observed from a distance. Charlie Decker's voice is immediate and raw and sometimes uncomfortably recognizable, the voice of a young person who is furious at a world that seems organized around his humiliation and who has run out of ways to express that fury within acceptable limits.
What makes the book genuinely strange and genuinely interesting, even now, is what happens in the classroom after the initial violence. This is not a book about a shooting in any straightforward sense. The shooting happens quickly. What the book is actually about is the long afternoon that follows, in which Charlie holds court over his classmates and something unexpected begins to happen. The students, rather than maintaining terror and distance, start to engage with him. Old social hierarchies begin to dissolve. A boy who has been quietly terrifying a girl for months suddenly has that behavior named and examined in front of everyone. A kid who has never been able to say what he actually thinks about his own life starts talking. The class bully, the golden boy, the quiet girl at the back all find themselves in a room where the usual rules do not apply, and the results are deeply uncomfortable in ways that have nothing to do with the gun.
King is exploring something here about adolescent social dynamics, about the violence that happens constantly in high school corridors without weapons, about the way institutional authority requires a kind of performance of normality that damages the people required to perform it. Charlie's position as captor gives the other students permission to stop performing, and what comes out when they stop is not always what you would expect. Some of the classroom scenes are genuinely powerful, written with the kind of intuitive psychological accuracy that King was already capable of very early in his career.
