Tangled Up in Blue

The Signet Paperbacks of Richard Bachman

These four long-out-of-print paperback originals from Signet/New American Library are some of the most highly collectible books in Stephen King's, uh, oeuvre. Written under the now-famous pseudonym of Richard Bachman while his career was beginning to take off at the turn of the 1970s and early '80s, they were King's effort at anonymity, seeing if his work could survive without the name "Stephen King" attached to it. It couldn't, and these books pretty much disappeared into obscurity. I believe the only one to gain a cult following was The Long Walk (July 1979), which I happened to read well before King was exposed as the actual author. Ooh lucky me! It's pretty cool and I recall being shaken by it.

 

His first work as Bachman, Rage (Sept 1977), has become one of King's most notorious, one he actually has refused to allow back in print. The story of a disturbed teenager who brings a gun to his high school, kills his teacher and then holds the classroom hostage... well, I think you can see why King might be squeamish about it today. It's probably impolitic of me to tell you how much a couple friends and I enjoyed Rage when we were about 16, but 'twas so.

Roadwork (March 1981), the third Bachman book, never appealed to me and I think I gave up after a few pages. Rereading its synopsis on the back, though, has got me intrigued enough to try it again. Then there was The Running Man (May 1982), of which I recall nothing save it was quite different from the campy fun of the  Schwarzenegger/Richard Dawson flick.

I think they all have pretty great cover art - well, Running Man's isn't so hot - and if you've got several hundred bucks (or maybe a grand?) lying about you can pick 'em up off eBay. The only one I own is an old library-discarded Long Walk, probably the same one I read as a kid.

 

 

This omnibus entitled The Bachman Books (Nov 1986) was a popular read among my horror-fiction-reading pals and me, but I lost my copy years ago, so I can't recall just what King said in "Why I Was Bachman." You can read a thorough tale of the Bachman years here. Bachman's cover was blown just after Thinner came out in hardcover in 1986. But you probably knew that.

The Long Walk by Richard Bachman (1979): Teenage Kicks

Have you looked up how much original paperback editions of Stephen King's pseudonym Richard Bachman are going for? Hundreds of dollars. Unfortunately I don't think my copy of The Long Walk is worth nearly that much; it's a discarded book I grabbed at a sale some time ago from my hometown library. I'm sure it's got to be the same one I read as a teenager in the '80s. It's actually coded inside as YA: Young Adult. Guess that kid in bell-bottoms on the cover makes the book look like it should be shelved with the S.E. Hintons and Robert Cormiers and Paul Zindels.

UK paperback

 
It's a grim and unrelenting short novel set in the near future in which there's an actual "long walk," undertaken by teenage boys deemed the fittest and healthiest. There is no finish line, no half-time, no fouls and no timeouts. Military men in tanks follow them to make sure no one walks slower than 4 mph; anyone who does is shot dead on the spot. The winner literally gets anything, everything, he wants. Like another Bachman book, The Running Man (1982), it posits a terrifying world in which games are played to the death while an enraptured populace looks on. The boys themselves succumb to their physical and mental limitations as well as the psychological tensions that arise between the last few Walkers. Its allegorical nature and ambiguous ending align The Long Walk with such maddening young adult fiction as I Am the Cheese and Lord of the Flies.

I was probably 14 or so when I read it, and it was a disturbing read, totally unlike King's horror novels. Probably not even fair to compare it to King's books because at the time, no one knew Bachman was his pseudonym. Now the book I really want to track down is an original copy of Bachman's Rage (1977), which King has let go completely out of print. Anybody got a spare $200 for an old paperback?