The Science of Stephen King

The thing is, one book is all most writers want to produce or can produce in the course of a year and some of them only publish a book every two years. Ed McBain is another novelist who publishes multiple books in some years and his original name was Evan Hunter. That’s the name he’s always published under and he adopted the pen name of Ed McBain for the same reason I adopted Richard Bachman and that was what made it possible for me to do two books in one year. I just did them under different names and eventually the public got wise to this because you can change your name but you can’t really disguise your style. The name Richard Bachman actually came from when they called me and said we’re ready to go to press with this novel, what name shall we put on it? And I hadn’t really thought about that. Well, I had, but the original name—Gus Pillsbury—had gotten out on the grapevine and I really didn’t like it that much anyway, so they said they needed it right away and there was a novel by Richard Stark on my desk so I used the name Richard and that’s kind of funny because Richard Stark is in itself a pen name for Donald Westlake and what was playing on the record player was “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” by Bachman Turner Overdrive, so I put the two of them together and came up with Richard Bachman.1

Written in first person, Rage chronicles the mental deterioration of Charlie Decker, a high school student who has lived through an abusive childhood, thus he is drawn to hateful speech and violence. The novel crescendos when after expulsion by the principal, Charlie chooses to take his misdirected revenge out on his teachers and fellow students. After setting his locker on fire, Charlie, armed with a pistol he had kept at school, shoots and kills both his algebra and history teachers.

The MacDonald Triad, proposed in 1963 by psychiatrist J. M. MacDonald, points to three actions that tend to indicate later violent tendencies: arson, cruelty to animals, and enuresis.

He then keeps his fellow students hostage in a classroom with the power of his gun, reveling in a level of control he has never felt before. That is, until the police force their way in after a four-way stand-off, maiming Charlie and taking him into custody.

While the plot of Rage is unsettling in its harrowing realism of today’s school-shooting crisis, it was less culturally relevant in the late 1970s. While school violence has existed since the inception of education, statistics show that the death toll and number of incidents have risen in recent decades. In the study “Historical Examination of United States Intentional Mass School Shootings in the 20th and 21st Centuries: Implications for Students, Schools, and Society,” researchers used the definition of mass murder (four or more intentional homicides in one event) as criteria for mapping the rise of mass school shootings in America. For this study, they also included injuries toward the total number. In the 1960s, when Stephen King began writing Rage, there were zero incidents that met this criteria. In the 1970s, in which Rage was published, there was only one mass incident which led to the death of two people. Subsequently, in the 1980s there is the first visual rise on the study’s graph. Seven incidents met the mass murder requirement, resulting in the death of twelve. In the 1990s, the incidents nearly doubled to thirteen in which thirty-six people lost their lives. There is a drop in deaths in the 2000s, down to fourteen, and then a dramatic rise in the 2010s, to a staggering fifty-one. Remember, these are mass incidents, and do not include school shootings in which less than four were injured or died.

As referenced in the study, there is also a rise in adolescents rather than adults as the perpetrators, and a possible theory as to why: “Another alarming trend is that the overwhelming majority of 21st century shooters were adolescents, suggesting that it is now easier for adolescents to access guns and adolescents are more frequently suffering from mental illness or limited conflict resolution skills.”2 They also point out that in less than twenty years we have been inflicted with a stunning amount of gun violence in our institutions of learning: “To date, the 21st century shootings have resulted in sixty-six deaths as opposed to fifty-five for the entirety of the 20th century.” The school-shooting epidemic is at the center of today’s media and politics.

The youngest school shooter is six-year-old Dedric Darnell Owens, who fatally shot a classmate in 2000.