Lezersrecensie
banned
Charlie Decker goes berserk at school! After he gets suspended he grabs a gun from his locker and goes to his classroom, shoots his teacher and takes the entire class hostage. It's clear Charlie is very disturbed and has a huge problem with authority. After holding it back for a long time he finally acts on it.
What will become a seriously long and tense afternoon will also be a very clarifying experience, for Charlie but especially for his classmates whom he urges to lay their souls bare. Pitted against themselves and each other they need to find a way to survive this excruciating ordeal while the police and the school need to find a way to stop Charlie from killing more people.
Rage is the first book that was written and published under King's pseudonym Richard Bachman and collected in the 'The Bachman Books' until Stephen King himself decided to have it withdrawn from publishing in later editions, which is quite unfortunate. But as a European this may be hard to understand, as an American though it is not as there are a lot of school shootings and this book deals with just that kind of issue. King himself didn't want his book to be an inspiration for teenagers to go out and kill teachers or fellow students.
Apart from that, Rage is not the best Bachman novel but it does offer a teen's inner struggles with authority, with finding a way to deal with it (the wrong way!) and finally somehow dealing with it and sharing a tense moment (afternoon) with peers that deal with their own problems and struggles. I think King managed to offer a look into the mind of a teenager and the way they look at the world. For Charlie this may be a very distorted kind of world, the beginnings of a psychopath's mind!
Last year I reread the three other stories from this collection but I wanted to make the collection complete so I reread Rage as well. The only two remaining Bachman stories I'll have to reread this year now are 'Thinner' and 'The Regulators'. Thinner will be pretty soon as it will be released in Dutch this year in a beautiful limited edition by Luitingh Sijthoff (LS Uitgeverij)
What will become a seriously long and tense afternoon will also be a very clarifying experience, for Charlie but especially for his classmates whom he urges to lay their souls bare. Pitted against themselves and each other they need to find a way to survive this excruciating ordeal while the police and the school need to find a way to stop Charlie from killing more people.
Rage is the first book that was written and published under King's pseudonym Richard Bachman and collected in the 'The Bachman Books' until Stephen King himself decided to have it withdrawn from publishing in later editions, which is quite unfortunate. But as a European this may be hard to understand, as an American though it is not as there are a lot of school shootings and this book deals with just that kind of issue. King himself didn't want his book to be an inspiration for teenagers to go out and kill teachers or fellow students.
Apart from that, Rage is not the best Bachman novel but it does offer a teen's inner struggles with authority, with finding a way to deal with it (the wrong way!) and finally somehow dealing with it and sharing a tense moment (afternoon) with peers that deal with their own problems and struggles. I think King managed to offer a look into the mind of a teenager and the way they look at the world. For Charlie this may be a very distorted kind of world, the beginnings of a psychopath's mind!
Last year I reread the three other stories from this collection but I wanted to make the collection complete so I reread Rage as well. The only two remaining Bachman stories I'll have to reread this year now are 'Thinner' and 'The Regulators'. Thinner will be pretty soon as it will be released in Dutch this year in a beautiful limited edition by Luitingh Sijthoff (LS Uitgeverij)
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