Walking the Nightmare

This is an old paperback. It’s been with me for what seems forever, accompanying me through ten different moves between cities, provinces, states, and countries. It’s an essential relic of my teenage years; specifically that moment when I began the first steps to seriously consider becoming a writer. Every time I open it for a re-read it always reveals something new about its contents, about the time it was purchased, and about myself.

It was spring 1987. I had been first bitten by the Stephen King bug the previous August when I saw Stand By Me, based on his novella The Body (already detailed in Celluloid Heroes Part III). I purchased this particular paperback at Leeds County Books, then one of only two bookstores in Brockville. The other, a Smithbooks, was situated in the Thousands Island Mall in the city’s north end, and a second-hand store, Seekers Books, was, like Leeds County, situated on the main downtown thoroughfare of (ironically) King Street. Of those three bookstores as far as I know only Seekers remains, having stopped there on a swing through Brockville back in 2022.

I don’t remember what prompted me to go shop for my first Stephen King that day though I suspect my Grandmother, herself a big horror fan, had something to do with it because she’d liked his books (I recall being morbidly curious of the garish paperback cover for Cujo on a visit a few years previous). While I had read The Body in the Different Seasons collection I borrowed from the Brockville Public Library (the basis for “Stand By Me”) I hadn’t yet spent my own money on a King book. In 1987 there were plentiful options: that day alone I scoped everything from Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining, to then recent offerings like Pet Sematary, Christine, and Misery. But my eyes gravitated to The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King. I gave the back cover a read. These were four short novels written by King and published post-The Shining by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman drawing its nomenclature from author Richard Stark – itself a pseudonym of Donald Westlake, one of King’s favorite writers – and Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive, a song from which was playing on the radio when King was brainstorming surnames.

The idea, as King outlined in his introduction “Why I Was Bachman”, was simple; he was worried about oversaturating the market with his books so he and his agent devised Bachman, to publish small runs of some early novels written by King while still in High School and later College. To King these for short novels were “pretty good” but clearly not horror. Two of them, The Long Walk and The Running Man were Dystopian sci-fi, both centering around nightmarish gameshows in a futuristic fascist America (indeed they could have been set in the same universe). The other two were suspense/character studies; Rage, which centered on a high school student who shoots his math teacher and takes his class hostage, and Roadwork, a bleak tale of a man who’s lost everything – his wife, his son – but his house and soon find himself embroiled in a fight to keep that as well.

I decided to take the plunge, figuring four novellas for the price of one book (with taxes, around $7 and change Canadian) a deal too good to pass up. I paid, dropped it into my backpack, and biked home. I cleared the homework deck, stretched out on my bed, opened the book and began to read.

Of the tales in Bachman, Rage left the strongest impression on me as its protagonist, troubled teenager Charlie Decker, was only a few years older than I. Because it was the oldest of the books – written by King while he himself was a high school senior – its voice felt closest to authenticity in all of King’s work especially in its capturing of the teenager’s voice (contrast that with the teenaged protagonist of his more recent Fairy Tale who feels like a 75 year-old man writing a teenager which, frankly, it was). Rage is all anger and self-righteousness; Decker, already facing suspension if not expulsion and possible jail time for attacking a teacher with an adjustable wrench, decides one day to “get it on”, brings a gun to school and shoots his math teacher in the head. Another teacher is shot trying to stop Decker. Then the door is locked, the school evacuated save for the other occupants of his math class. Over the next several hours Charlie will hold court, airing grievances, the whys and wherefores of who he is and what he’s done, and the other students will do the same with their own messed up, miserable lives.

Rage also left an impression I think because of my age. We’d moved to Brockville the previous August after a horrible year and a bit in Greensboro North Carolina (detailed elsewhere on this website; click the “Greensboro” tag for all the gory details). While I’d been friend-less in Greensboro, Brockville was almost the flip-side. Within the first few weeks of eighth grade I’d been invited to the cool kids’ parties, I landed my first (lame eighth grade) girlfriend (she wasn’t lame; just the idea of having a girlfriend in eight grade) shortly after, and was pretty much welcomed. By springtime things had settled, I was no longer the mysterious new kid, and while still abundant with friends and well-liked overall, could sense storm clouds on the horizon.

Those storm clouds? High School. You see, in Greensboro I’d been in a more typical middle school environment, where in Brockville eighth grade was pretty much like kindergarten through seventh; the same class of kids, the same classroom, the same teacher, the same school. These were kids who largely had been with each other since kindergarten; these were friendships and relationships going on nearly a decade in some cases. But with high school, a new building, new faces, teachers, classes, and classmates that was all about to change and change dramatically. I knew from the Greensboro experience what high school was; an alienating world of cliques, popularity contests and conflicts. I knew it was going to be rough and expressed as much to the friends I did have. They scoffed; things wouldn’t change that much, right? Well, I won’t go into all the details but it was once of those instances where the new guy was right on the money.

Rage was notorious for many reasons; perhaps the biggest was King’s decision to pull the book from publication following a string of school shootings that the perpetrators had either owned copies of the book or spoken glowing of it. Even today it’s a tough one to track down unless you head to eBay where a paperback identical to the one I own will set you back thirty dollars at least (some listings go up to fifteen hundred dollars, with a rare paperback of Rage in its original release asking an astounding eight thousand dollars). I would wager the inclusion of the hard-to-find Rage the main reason for such prices. As for King’s explanation for Rage (initially titled “Getting It On”) being pulled from print, well, the debate is ongoing, but any book involving a school shooting was inevitably bound to hurtle into the unyielding brick wall that is Life in America, one nation under gun, at some point. [1]

But if Rage was the primer then The Long Walk was the detonator. It was the characters; the interplay between all of them. With nearly a hundred named and numbered participants on the Walk naturally some fade into the background but King manages to juggle well over thirty speaking parts and have them all register on the reader. It’s also the world-building; the half-track, its stone-faced soldiers, the numbered participants, the three warnings, and the “ticket” delivered from the barrel of a carbine rifle. The premise is simple: the hundred participants of The Long Walk do just that, beginning at a marker on the Maine-new Brunswick border, traverse Maine, and enter New Hampshire before it all comes down to two finalists outside of Danvers Massachusetts. Set in an alternate version of 1970s America, John Travolta references and all, the history woven through the tale – oblique references to an East Coast blitz during the dying days of a World War II that continued into the 1950s indicate a much different outcome – remains part of the scenery familiar enough to us in the here and now (or in Walk’s case, there and then) while just skewing slightly off-kilter. The second longest tale in the collection after Roadwork, of all the Bachman Books it remains my favorite, as well as a top ten-top tier King for me.[2]

So I was all-in on King but after finishing The Long Walk I needed a break myself. School was winding down, I had assignments to finish, tests to pass. I shelved The Bachman Books with the intention of getting back to them when summer arrived. And that indeed happened, though the circumstances of that revisiting felt, in the moment, like something out of a King story.

Because the summer of 1987 would go down in my memory as the summer my face fell off.

We’d visited my cousins that July, and I had plans to be dropped off at my buddy Mark’s home to accompany him to their timeshare up in Muskoka. The visit went well but the night before leaving I started feeling under the weather. Like, really under the weather. I sparked a fever, I went to bed early, and when I awoke my face was covered in pockmarks.

Yes, friends, at the ripe old age of fourteen I had my first case of the Chicken Pox; late for most kids but right on time to fuck up my summer vacation handily. My four year-old cousin had just gotten over a case and was highly communicable and so I got it. Bad. Obviously there’d be no visit to Muskoka. There’d be no summer vacation at all. Instead I got to go home and get used to both the itchiness, and the smell of calamine lotion.

I was miserable. Trying to avoid any scratches or breaks that would leave me scarred. I was semi-successful – one pox formed under a pimple already formed on the bridge of my nose leaving a scar that’s still there to this day – but the worst part of it was the monotony. Being hit with the pox left me highly contagious so I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone. Our house wasn’t air-conditioned either so that just added to the uncomfortable misery. I took to hiding out in our basement where it was cool and comfortable, like some hideous monster from, well, from a Stephen King story (or a Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont one; two writers whose work I would discover through King and his non-fiction book Danse Macabre).

In the basement there was distraction aplenty. There was the TV and all that a wonderous 13 channels could afford me which in the daytime pretty much meant game shows in the morning, soaps in the afternoon, and nothing else until roughly 4pm when Video Hits on CBC would begin its daily run.

To be fair Samantha Taylor was 50% of why I watched Video Hits and I’m not alone there either.

My parents’ old record player and stereo was down there also, so I got acquainted with their music collection; Gordon Lightfoot, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, The Guess Who, and Creedence Clearwater Revival were in constant rotation along with a freshly acquired copy of U2’s The Joshua Tree . Seeing as the basement was the most comfortable place in the house that summer I asked if I could sleep down there on the fold-out couch. For July into August I pretty much never left except to go to the bathroom and meals. To keep myself distracted as I slowly recovered, I exercised and I read. The exercise was to keep moving, and keep active. That combined with the sheer amount of weight shed while fighting off the pox meant I really slimmed down. The reading thing; well, since bitten by the King bug I had found increasing interest in the strange, the unusual, and the unexplained. My birthday gift earlier that year had been a subscription to the Time Life Enchanted World series of books; a must have after seeing the iconic TV commercials featuring Vincent Price.

Those Enchanted World books remained with me in the basement, but having read through Wizards and Witches, Ghosts, Night Creatures, and The Fall of Camelot enough times over my brain craved more stimulation and with not much else to do I once again picked up The Bachman Books and read the second half of the stories.[3]

Of the remainder Roadwork was probably my least favorite, not because it’s a bad story (technically speaking it’s the best of the bunch being the then most recently written of the pack), but because its story of middle-aged Barton Dawes fighting back against a world that seems determined to grind him to dust were the most remote from myself and my life at age fourteen. Identification with the protagonists of Rage and The Long Walk was easy when you were within three years spitting distance of them, and The Running Man’s schlocky enjoyment was bolstered in large part by just how different it was from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “adaptation” released that same summer.

But Dawes’ dilemma in Roadwork was too distant for me to really appreciate; a father grieving the death of his child, estranged from his wife, unable to function outside of his own self-destruction and finding himself increasingly out of touch with a world racing to profit at all costs was too remote. Reading it in 2024 though I was shocked to find how prescient King/Bachman was in our modern age of late-stage capitalism, “enshitification”, the loss of our third places, homes, bars and nightclubs, movie theaters and bookstores bulldozed to erect more stacked shipping-container luxury condominium boxes. The interstate about to be rammed through Dawes’ home is itself a big con; relentlessly constructed without actual need so the unnamed state can continue receiving federal funding. Even knowing the outcome on my later reread I almost wanted the resolution of Roadwork to find Dawes triumph at the end, but it was not to be. While in the present day one empathizes with Dawes’ situation, the guy remains an unrepentant, unlikeable asshole. Not even the revelation all of this has transpired in part because of the death of Dawes’ young son from cancer humanizes him.

All the Bachman stories share one common thread in how bleak they are.[4] Two end in the deaths of their protagonists (I won’t say which ones), two end with their protagonists alive but quite possibly driven insane from their separate ordeals (again, I won’t say who). In point of fact Roadwork hews closer to King’s run of crime stories like Billy Summers, and the Finders Keepers series; taut suspense thrillers with vivid characters and pages that self-turn. Roadwork’s biggest problem though remains in its protagonist himself; while his story is a compelling narrative Dawes is just too miserable to enjoy spending time with. It was reassuring in a way to see that even in the early 80s King was still learning his craft as well.

Thanks to the pox I couldn’t see The Running Man in the theater and had to wait for video before I could. The movie and the story it’s based on are night and day. The latter is a glum, grim, very serious dystopian nightmare whose protagonist Richards must compete in a grueling game-show that sees him pursued across the northeastern US in a fight to the death, all to be able to afford the life-saving medical treatments his sick daughter needs. Contrast that with the garish Arnold flick where he squares off with just as garish gladiators in a hellish Los Angeles while Family Feud’s Richard Dawson plays a nightmare version of his genial real-life game-show host. Corny, campy, and contrasted with that same summer’s far superior Predator, The Running Man, with its cameos from musicians Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa, and wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura as a retired gladiator turned color commentator seems to be having more fun than I did watching it. As for the Bachman book, the relentlessness of the tale culminated in a fiery climax that while spectacular – and inevitable – left a sour taste in my mouth. In it I can easily see why Bachman never really took flight. What “Bachman” never learned, having died of “cancer of the pseudonym” when he was finally outed by an enterprising journalist, is what King did; that even the darkest of stories need some glimmer of hope in the end. Yes, even Pet Sematary.

The most interesting thing about these Bachman books is they all feel of the very same world. The Long Walk and The Running Man could share the exact same (“what if the Nazis won WW2”) universe, and it’s easy to see a kinship between Charlie Decker of Rage and Barton George Dawes of Roadwork: two unyielding objects who refuse to bend and end up broken as a result. I think though what makes these grim, gloomy Bachman protagonists fascinating is how believable they are. Who hasn’t driven past their own childhood home and found it re-painted and landscaped beyond recognition or torn down and rebuilt into a multi-unit modernist monstrosity? Who, in their teenage years, hasn’t felt like a misfit unable to fit in anywhere? Where the characters in these two more grounded in reality Bachman Books leap off the page is in the violent means in which they resist the roles thrust upon them; Decker kills two teachers and takes a classroom hostage. Dawes undermines his place of employment, shatters his marriage, and uses violent means to disrupt the eminent domain about demolish his home for a freeway extension that was unnecessary to begin with.

When finished with Bachman that first read in 1987, and still dealing with the pox (which was just beginning to fade), I asked my mother if she could go to Seekers and see if any Stephen King books were available I didn’t have any specific titles in mind so when she came home later that day with lightly used paperbacks just dropped off paperbacks of Cujo and Carrie I was set. Later that summer came Different Seasons – the book I’d already read from the library – but now a copy I could call my own and still own to this day. Cujo was lost when lent to someone who I legitimately can’t recall, but this copy of Carrie – a rare first edition paperback as it happens – is the one I still possess.

This copy, as it happens …

While I probably would have become a die-hard horror fan eventually, it was that summer my face fell off that really sparked my interest and my fandom of King; being stranded and temporarily disfigured at home was certainly an identifiable catalyst for that fandom. Neither horror nor King have really left my life either. There was a period in the 90s I drifted away from him, until 1997 – a decade on from that fateful summer of 1987 – when, working a dull as dishwater summer job I found myself hitting up the local used bookstore where I purchased and finally read the doorstops that are The Stand and It respectively. That return to Castle Rock, and Derry, soon led me to Jerusalem’s Lot, Dark Score Lake, and Little Tall Island; fictional locations very familiar to King’s constant readers and Greek to everyone else. After 1997 I never stopped gorging on King and while my interest has waxed and waned now and again every new King book is a must-read for yours truly. He’s in his 70s now and I hope he’s still writing when I’m in mine.

Sitting poolside this past summer I dove back into The Bachman Books for a month-long re-read and found those familiar names and characters waiting for me, ready to perform in my theater of the mind yet again. I held court with Charlie Decker in Rage, took The Long Walk with Garraty, McVries, Stebbins, Olson, and mad, mad Barkovich. I holed up in my house with Dawes in Roadwork, and followed The Running Man on his nightmarish journey through a New England landscape familiar to me now after six years as a transplanted Yankee. I’m nearly forty years removed from that teenager who picked The Bachman Books off the Leeds County bookstore shelf and decided to take the plunge, but reading those stories again made me feel fourteen all over again.

There remains a particular alchemy in re-reading some old favorites; treading familiar ground yet discovering something new every time. That’s why stories are important. That’s why they resonate, echo and ripple through our lives.

That’s why they matter and why they always will.

ADDENDUM: a reader asked if I was familiar with The Stephen King Book Club on YouTube. The answer is yes, and it was their step-by-step “broadcast” reporting on The Long Walk that inspired me to pick up the Bachman Books again for a summer reread. I recommend the channel and the first episode of their Long Walk Recap, linked right here:


[As an addendum, this will be the final website update of 2024. I’m busy on a couple of other projects, one of which I hope to formally announce here in January. Until then …]

[1] I have one myself – a thriller titled Underneath – that begins with an act of gun violence in a high school and gets even bleaker from there. Small wonder agents have given it a hard pass without even reading the thing. A pity too, as it’s one of my better efforts.

[2] The remaining ten (in no particular order) are ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, Bag of Bones, The Stand, The Body, Apt Pupil, 1963, The Mist and, of course, On Writing. Honorable mention to his non-fiction book Danse Macabre; a big inspiration for my Celluloid Heroes book and web series.

[3] I still own that complete set of 21 books by the way and they remain one of my most prized collections.

[4] The Bachman books not included in this collection – Thinner, Blaze, and The Regulators – are all similarly downbeat. Small wonder Bachman wasn’t a blockbuster of an author …