--- type: "Article" title: "Rage: The Novel Stephen King Took Out of Print" description: "Rage is the one novel Stephen King pulled from print, after real school shootings were linked to it. A look at the book, and at King choosing to bury it." resource: "https://mysteriousgalaxies.com/episode/rage/" tags: ["Stephen King", "Into the King-Verse"] status: "stable" generated: by: "mg-okf/0.2" at: "2026-07-09T23:16:01+00:00" verified: - by: "human:todd-orourke" at: "2026-07-09T23:16:01+00:00" stale_after: "2028-07-09" sources: - resource: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(King_novel)" title: "Wikipedia, \"Rage (King novel)\"" - resource: "https://stephenking.com/works/novel/rage.html" title: "StephenKing.com, \"Rage\"" - resource: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_High_School_shooting" title: "Wikipedia, \"Heath High School shooting\"" timestamp: 2026-07-09T23:16:01+00:00 --- # Rage: The Novel Stephen King Took Out of Print There's a [Stephen King](/writers/stephen-king/) novel you can't buy new. Not because it failed, and not because it was forgotten. Because King buried it himself. He wrote it as a teenager, published it under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, and then, after it started turning up at real crime scenes, he asked his publisher to take it out of print. That book is *Rage*, and it's the only novel King has ever pulled. It's a hard book to write about, and a hard one to recommend, but the story around it is one of the most honest things King has ever been part of. A note before we go on: I discuss the plot, including the ending, and the real violence connected to the book. ## What it's about *Rage *is the story of Charlie Decker, a fifteen-year-old at Placerville High who walks into school one morning with a gun. He's just been called in over an earlier outburst, when he nearly killed a teacher with a pipe wrench. The meeting goes badly, he leaves, takes a pistol from his locker, sets the locker on fire, and returns to his algebra class, where he shoots the teacher in front of everyone. > "When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain." That's just the opening. What follows isn't an action standoff. There's no ticking clock or impressive rescue. Charlie holds the class hostage and starts talking, and more than that, he starts making his classmates talk. One by one, the students begin confessing the worst things in their lives: the bullying, the abuse at home, the shame they've never said out loud. It turns into a raw, unsupervised group therapy session, and the disturbing part is that it works. Charlie stops reading like the villain, and the class stops treating him like one. Only one student refuses. Ted Jones, the clean-cut, put-together kid. He won't confess or crack, and that makes him the real target. The others, loosened by their shared catharsis, turn on him and press him until he does break, and by the end, he's catatonic. That's the actual climax, not the shooting or the police outside, but the breaking of the one kid who wouldn't conform. Charlie tries to force the officers into killing him, survives, is judged unfit to stand trial, and is institutionalized. The book closes on a note he writes from the psychiatric ward. ## A teenager's rage, on the page King started this book in high school, under the title *Getting It On*, and finished a draft around 1970 before it sat in a drawer for years. He was seventeen or eighteen, writing a fifteen-year-old from inside the same world he was living in, and you can feel it. The prose is a teenager's, and so is the fury. Charlie's violent, absent father echoes King's own, the father who walked out when King was a toddler and never came back. Whatever else *Rage *is, it reads less like a character King invented than one he channeled. > "Lunacy is when you can’t see the seams where they stitched the world together anymore." What the book gets uncomfortably well is the specific suffocation of being a teenager in a world run by adults who aren't listening. The sense that the rules are fake, that the guidance counselors are useless, that everyone is phoning it in while you're boiling over. At its center, *Rage *is a scream into the void, and it doesn't much care whether you enjoy hearing it. ## Is it good? Not in the usual sense. It's rough and overwritten, the pacing wanders, and the dialogue sometimes reaches for profundity it hasn't earned. King himself has never pretended it's among his best. This isn't a book anyone teaches in a writing class. > "That's what a shrink is for; friends and neighbors; their job is to fuck the mentally disturbed and make them pregnant with sanity." It's good, the way a confession is. It's emotionally true even when the narrator isn't reliable, and it refuses to hand you clean answers. Is Charlie a sociopath, a product of abuse, a symbol, a warning? The book never decides, because Charlie never decides, and that ambiguity is the point. It's effective without being enjoyable or comfortable, which isn't the same thing, and whether that adds up to "good" depends on whether you want emotional truth or craft from a novel. *Rage *only really offers the first. ## The book King buried *Rage *wasn't pulled by a school board over language or a sex scene. King pulled it himself because real school shooters had read it, and a few of them echoed it. In 1988, a California student held his class hostage at gunpoint in a way that recalled the book. In 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington, a fourteen-year-old shot and killed his algebra teacher and two students. In 1997, at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, another fourteen-year-old killed three students, and a copy of *Rage *was found in his locker. King has said that last one was enough for him. He asked his publisher to take the book out of print, and they did. He's been careful and consistent about what he's claiming. He doesn't believe *Rage *turned anyone into a killer. He's said the kids who did these things were already broken. But he came to see the book as a possible accelerant, and he put it plainly: “You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.” He wrote about the decision at length in "Guns," his 2013 essay after Sandy Hook, and it's among the most sober things he's written about his own work. What stays with me is that he took responsibility. Most writers would have defended the work, or blamed the culture, or pointed out that others read it and did nothing. King didn't argue the point. He decided the small risk wasn't worth it and quietly let the book go. You can disagree about whether pulling a novel does anything, but it's still a rare thing to watch an author choose that. ## Reading it now *Rage *reaches you differently now than it did in the 1970s. Back then, a school shooting was a rare shock. Now it's a headline we've all learned to absorb, and the book's central horror has walked out of fiction and into the news. That doesn't make it less powerful, but it does change the lens. If you go looking for it, and you'd have to, since it survives mostly in used copies of the old *Bachman Books* anthology, it reads less like a novel than a cultural artifact: a snapshot from a time before this was a weekly event, written by a young man working out his own anger with no idea what his words would later brush up against. Don't come to it expecting [*The Shining*](/episode/the-shining/). There's no monster here and no supernatural dread. The horror is closer and plainer than that. There are echoes of Carrie White from *[Carrie](https://mysteriousgalaxies.com/episode/carrie/)*, but Rage feels like opening a wound that shows no signs of healing, largely because of how realistic the portrayal is (at least here in America). It doesn't moralize, and it doesn't offer answers. It's a snapshot of a mind in crisis, Charlie's and arguably a young King's, and it isn't trying to be anything more comforting than that. ## Final thoughts *Rage *is rough and a little too in love with its own intensity, nowhere close to King's best. But it's the book that forced him to reckon with his own reach, with the strange, unpredictable power of putting a story into the world and not controlling where it lands. It isn't a masterpiece, but it might be one of King's most important, precisely because of what he chose to do with it. It's the first of the Bachman books, and the only novel he's ever let die. If you've read it, I'd like to hear how it sat with you. Tell me in the comments. Where does *Rage* land among King’s 1970s books? I ranked all eight of them, worst to best, in [Every Stephen King Book of the 1970s, Ranked](/essay/ranking-stephen-king-1970s-books/) (it ended up last, at number eight). ## FAQs **What was Stephen King's book Rage about?** Rage follows Charlie Decker, a troubled fifteen-year-old who brings a gun to Placerville High, kills his teacher, and holds his algebra class hostage. What follows isn't an action standoff but a long, uncomfortable confession session, as Charlie pushes his classmates into admitting their own buried pain and turns them against the one student who won't crack. He's eventually judged unfit for trial and institutionalized. King wrote it as a teenager and first published it under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. **Is Rage a good book?** By conventional measures, not really. The prose is rough and the pacing uneven, which King himself has acknowledged. But it's emotionally honest in a way that hits hard, a raw look at teenage anger written by a teenager, and it's effective even when it isn't enjoyable. It offers no clean answers. Its real weight now comes from the story around it: it's the one novel King chose to pull from print. **Why was Rage taken off the shelves?** King published Rage under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, then later took it out of print himself after several real-life school shootings were linked to it. He has always said he doesn't believe the book turns anyone into a killer, but he came to see it as a possible accelerant for kids already in crisis. In 1988 a California student held his class hostage at gunpoint in an echo of the book. In 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington, fourteen-year-old Barry Loukaitis shot and killed his algebra teacher and two students. In 1997, at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal killed three students, and a copy of Rage was found in his locker. King has said the Carneal shooting was the one that decided him, and he asked his publisher to take the book out of print. As he put it, "You don't leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it." Rage was once collected in The Bachman Books, but newer editions of that anthology drop it. **Can you still buy Rage by Stephen King?** You can't buy a new copy of Rage, because King pulled the standalone book from publication in the US over its association with real-life school shootings. Your options are a used copy or a library. The most common way to read it is to track down a vintage, pre-owned edition of The Bachman Books, the anthology that once collected Rage alongside The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man. **What is Stephen King's most controversial book?** It's widely considered to be Rage, which King originally published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1977. The novel follows a troubled high school student who murders a teacher and holds his algebra class hostage, and King voluntarily asked his publisher to let it go out of print in the late 1990s after the plot was linked to several real-life school shootings. **Sources** - [Wikipedia, "Rage (King novel)"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(King_novel)) (writing history, the Bachman pseudonym, the linked shootings, and King pulling the book) - [StephenKing.com, "Rage"](https://stephenking.com/works/novel/rage.html) (the author's own page for the novel) - [Wikipedia, "Heath High School shooting"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heath_High_School_shooting) (the 1997 West Paducah, Kentucky shooting King has cited as the incident that decided him)