A review by jpjkemp
Rage by Richard Bachman

3.0

Throughout you are bombarded with the many mental illness problems that impact the shooter and narrator, Charlie Decker, and that drives him to commit many of the atrocities he does throughout the book. I believe it gave a fairly accurate depiction of mass shooters, trauma and isolation pushed Charlie to kill two of his teachers and take his classmates hostage. This parallels the problems that many modern mass shooters face. However, I believe the book takes a turn for the ugly when Charlie is able to completely psychoanalyze and break down all of his hostage classmates to the point of turning on one of their other classmates, Ted Jones. Ted is seen as the hero figure throughout the beginning of the story, the confident jock who is going to take down Charlie and save the class from this terror. However, Charlie manipulates all of his hostages into believing he won't hurt them, despite taking a bullet from a sniper as he was about to shoot Ted. The hostages turn on Ted to the point of brutally beating and torturing him into a catatonic state. It was not the shooting of the two teachers or the flashback of Charlie and his father brutalizing each other that caused my stomach to turn most, but the acute manipulation of Charlie to push his victims into violent offenders alongside their new ring leader. Charlie frequently uses the phrase "getting it on" to describe what they're doing, which refers to Charlie's yearn for people to be honest and understanding with him. But you can also see a need on Charlie's part for control of his situation as he's been missing that all his life. Rage leaves you wondering throughout reading whether Charlie truly deserves the empathy that King writes him to receive, but by the end, I had completely turned to where I was in the beginning. There was hope for a holistic approach to gun violence and the possibility for an empathetic future with policy, but the ending I feel ruins the main point that King cultivates throughout, 3/5.