Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King)

Born in New York, Richard Bachman's early years are somewhat of a mystery.

As a young man, Bachman served a four-year stint in the Coast Guard, which he then followed with ten years in the merchant marine.

Bachman finally settled down in rural central New Hampshire, where he ran a medium-sized dairy farm. He did his writing at night (he suffered from chronic insomnia), after the cows came home.

Bachman and his wife, Claudia Inez Bachman, had one child, a boy, who died in an unfortunate, Stephen King-ish type accident at the age of six. He apparently fell through a well and drowned. In 1982, a brain tumor was discovered near the base of Bachman's brain; tricky surgery removed it.

Bachman died suddenly in late 1985, of cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia.

At the time of his death, Bachman had published five novels:
Rage - 1977
The Long Walk - 1979
Roadwork - 1981
The Running Man - 1982
Thinner - 1984

The first four novels were published as paperbacks, but as Bachman had been gaining quite a constant readership, his last novel, Thinner, was published in hardcover and was well received by the critics.

At the time of his death, he was toying with an idea for a new novel, a rather gruesome suspense novel which would have been titled Misery, had he lived to write it. (Note: This title was later plagiarized by a well-known horror writer.)

Bachman fans received a bit of good news recently. In 1994, while preparing to move to a new house, the widow Bachman discovered a cardboard carton filled with manuscripts in the cellar. The carton contained a number of novels and stories, in varying degrees of completion. The most finished was a typescript of a novel entitled, The Regulators.

The widow took the manuscript to Bachman's former editor, Charles Verrill, who found it compared well with Bachman's earlier works. After only a few minor changes, and with the approval of the author's widow (now Claudia Eschelman), The Regulators will be published posthumorously in September of 1996 by Dutton. As of this time, no other information has been forthcoming as to the possibility of the remaining unpublished cartonworks being published.

As a brief side note, Charles Verrill also happens to edit the works of Stephen King, a writer whose works have been compared to the late Richard Bachman's. When asked his opinion of Bachman, King replied, "A nasty man....I'm glad that he's dead."

At the beginning of Stephen King's career, the general view among publishers was such that an author was limited to a book every year at the utmost; any more, it was felt, was not acceptable to the public. King therefore wanted to write under another name in order to double his production.

He convinced his publisher, Signet Books, to print these novels under a pseudonym. The originally selected pseudonym was Gus Pillsbury (King's maternal grandfather); but at the last moment King changed it to "Richard Bachman" in tribute to crime author Donald E. Westlake's long-running pseudonym Richard Stark. The name Stark was used in King's novel The Dark Half, a novel about an author with a pseudonym. The surname was in honour of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, a rock and roll band King was listening to at the time.

Rage is a quietly creepy tale of a high-school student going insane. In one heated afternoon, he kills his teacher, holds the class hostage, and proceeds to delve into the beginnings of his psychosis. Rage shows how easily King can capture a moment in time, an unforgettable moment. His evocation of a slowly draining mind is as effective here as it was in Pet Sematary.

Incidently, Rage is the only novel that King admits he wishes he never wrote. Several similar incidents have occured across the United States, and Rage has been mentioned in connection with them. Considering how sympathetic King is to his protagonist, it's easy to see how disillusioned teens could come to identify with its themes. -- Stone Junction

In the near future, a young boy has been one of 100 selected to take the Long Walk--a deadly contest of endurance and determination, in which each step can literally be your last. Follow the contestants' tortured footsteps as they struggle with each other, and themselves, to survive the race.

In this gritty narrative, a lone man takes on the wheels of progress in a showdown of cataclysmic proportions. When a highway project puts him out of work and threatens to destroy his home, he has more than enough time on his hands to plot his revenge. Driving his wife and friends away with his obstinate refusal to give in, he pushes the powers-that-be to the limit, taking a stand against what he sees as a criminal act in progress. Building to a shattering climax, Roadwork is a suspenseful tale you won't soon forget!

A bit of a departure from the supernatural horror that is most frequently associated with his work, the novel describes a science fiction dystopia where market capitalism and television game shows have spiraled out of control, and the separation between the haves and the have-nots has been formalized with separate currencies.

King establishes characters quickly, creating sympathy in the first few pages for Ben Richards--whose 18-month-old baby girl is suffering from a horrible cough, perhaps pneumonia. Not able to afford medicine, Richards enters himself in the last-chance money-making scheme of the Free-Vee games. The games include Treadmill to Bucks, in which heart-attack prone contestants struggle to outlast a progressively demanding treadmill, or the accurately named Swim the Crocodiles.

After a rigorous battery of physical and mental examinations, Richards is assigned "Elevator Six"--the path of a chosen few--that leads to The Running Man game. In this game, the stakes and the prizes are raised. Success means a life of luxury. Failure means death. Unfortunately, few ever win the game; in fact, as the producer tells Richards, in six years no one has survived.

Billy Halleck, a 300-pound lawyer, kills a gypsy due to his negligent driving. But thanks to some false evidence, the judge lets Halleck go. However, the deceased's father, a 109-year-old gypsy king, takes justice into his own hands by putting a horrible, ironic curse on the obese man.

Soon, through no effort of his own, Billy becomes thinner. And thinner. And thinner. While this seems like a godsend at first, the hex put on Billy quickly becomes a living nightmare -- with no end in sight...

It's a summer afternoon on Poplar Street in Wentworth, Ohio, and the 14-year-old who delivers the local shopper is biking his route. A weird-looking red van waits, motor running, at one end of the block. When the vehicle coasts down the street, the "fun" begins. Its windows roll down to let shotgun barrels protrude. The boy is blasted off his bike, the first of many victims of a wave of assaults by a strange company of cartoonish, futuristic shock troopers and western-movie cowboys. What's more, telephones, electricity, and wristwatches are dead all up and down the block; nobody from the next street over in either direction seems to notice the gunfire and burning buildings; and when some of the besieged neighbors try to get to an adjacent street, they discover their surroundings transformed from suburbia to a western desert landscape resembling a child's drawing. What in hell is going on?

Nevada is mostly a long stretch of desert you cross on the way to somewhere else. And with someone else, if you're lucky...because it's a scary place.

Headed down Route 50 in the brutal summer heat are people who are never going to reach their destinations. Like the Jacksons, a professor and his wife going home to New York City; the Carvers, a Wentworth, Ohio, family bound for a vacation at Lake Tahoe; and aging literary lion Johnny Marinville, inventing a gonzo image for himself astride a 700-pound Harley.

A dead cat nailed to a road sign heralds the little mining town of Desperation, a town that seems withered in the shade of a man-made mountain known as the China Pit. But it's worse than that, much worse. Regulating the traffic there is Collie Entragian, an outsize uniformed madman who considers himself the only law west of the Pecos. God forbid you should be missing a license plate or find yourself with a flat tire.

There's something very wrong here, all right, and Entragian is only the surface of it. The secrets embedded in Desperation's landscape, and the evil that infects the town like some viral hot zone, are both awesome and terrifying. But as young David Carver seems to know - though it scares him nearly to death to realize it - so are the forces summoned to combat them.

Blaze-Clayton Blaisdell Jr.-is a big dummy, very big: six-seven, 270. But not exactly very dumb. He was a smart little boy until his drunken father threw him downstairs three times in a row. He relearned to read a bit, mostly comic books, but was thereafter an otherwise learning-challenged ward of the state with a horrendous dent in his forehead.

Now a mid-twenties adult, he has just lost his bosom buddy and partner in petty cons, George, who still speaks to him somehow, especially about the big score, the one to retire on. Blaze realizes that George isn't really haunting him; in fact, Blaze possesses an excellent, though highly selective, memory.

In honor of George, he decides to do the big one, the kidnapping of a wealthy couple's baby. He succeeds, albeit imperfectly enough that the state cops and FBI know whodunit within a day, and he surprises himself by bonding with the infant, which for readers makes the hunt for Blaze an Alfred Hitchcock-like exercise in moral ambivalence.