Stephen King's Rage
03/11/25
Embedded Files
Stephen King is a world-renowned author known for modern literary classics such as The Shining, It, and The Green Mile. Even if you’ve never read his works, you’ll have doubtless seen one of his many film and TV adaptations. Stephen King’s bibliography is substantial, comprising 65 novels, five nonfiction books and over 200 short stories. His rate of publication has become a joke amongst his fans, and he’ll have probably released yet another masterpiece by the time you’ve finished reading this article. Many of these works have been critically acclaimed, and King can certainly be proud of his contribution to modern storytelling. However, there is one tale, amongst his collection, which I’m sure this literary giant would rather forget.
Written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, Rage is a 1977 novel about a school shooting. Readers are taken on a journey through the events leading up to the incident, the murder of the protagonist’s teacher, and the hostage situation which ensues. Eventually, the gunman is detained by the police and later committed to a psychiatric institution. What sets this book apart from other works on this topic is that Rage is set from the perspective of the shooter. Yet, the teenage narrator, Charlie Decker, is not presented as the malicious killer one might expect. Through the use of personal anecdotes, he is presented as having been deeply impacted by the actions of his abusive, alcoholic father and other childhood traumas. This arouses an unusual level of sympathy towards an individual responsible for such horrific crimes. He is also often portrayed as a more likeable figure than many of the book’s other characters, including the very classmates he threatens to kill. However, whilst they might pity him for the hardships he faced throughout his life, and perhaps find his personality more appealing than that of other figures, most readers will still recognise that Decker’s actions make him a depraved individual, hardly one to be admired.
Like a lot of King’s other works, Rage has become less known for its existence as a book and instead for what it has inspired. For his other books, this has manifested in the novel’s fame being supplanted by that of the film it was made into. Nowadays, when people think of King’s The Green Mile, their immediate thoughts tend to be about the 1999 film, rather than the 1996 novel that preceded it. Similarly, Rage is now better known for what it has influenced years after its publication, rather than its quality as a piece of literature. However, whilst this phenomenon occurring in King’s other works has been largely due to the popularity of their adaptations, the impact of Rage is remembered for reasons far more sinister.
It appears that writing from the perspective of a killer can have consequences beyond merely providing readers with an interesting viewpoint. For most sane readers of Rage, this opportunity to enter the mind of a school shooter serves as harmless entertainment. However, for a minority of readers, it serves a different purpose entirely: motivation.
STEPHEN KING, AUTHOR OF RAGE, IMAGE: KEVIN PAYRAVI
Since its publication, Rage has been linked to several real-life school shooting incidents. In 1988, 18-year-old Jeffrey Cox held 60 classmates hostage after having become enamoured with the book in the months prior. Cox’s friend later told the press that the teen had been influenced by King’s novel. Just over a year later, Rage appeared to have inspired yet another hostage incident, after police found a copy of the book in the bedroom of a high school student who had held 11 of his peers at gunpoint. In 1996, the novel’s effect proved fatal after 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis shot and killed his maths teacher and two other students in Frontier Middle School, Washington. This teen is believed to have tried to model his life after that of Charlie Decker. Loukaitis allegedly even quoted Decker during the crime, asking his classmates: “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?”, after having shot his teacher in the back. Yet it was the 1997 Heath High School shooting, in Kentucky, which caused three deaths and left five wounded, that proved to be the final nail in Rage’s coffin. After a copy of the novel was discovered in the shooter’s locker, King told his publisher to take it out of print.
This raises the question of whether art, and by extension artists, should be held accountable for the actions it inspires. King’s very decision to stop printing his novel cements the idea in the minds of many that it was not the gunman who was responsible for the shooting in Heath High School, but rather it is the novel that should be blamed. There have been other, similar cases of media being linked to horrific acts. The Child’s Play franchise is alleged to have influenced the 1993 murder of Jamie Bulger and the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre. The 1971 book by William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook, is associated with several terrorist incidents, as well as, like Rage, a school shooting. Not even music forgoes the risk of motivating evil, with Metallica’s ‘Ronnie’, the Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’, and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ all having links to real-life murder cases.
Many incidents like these have been followed by calls for greater restrictions on the creation, consumption, and distribution of such media. People who make these demands are holding art responsible for these crimes, rather than the human beings who have committed them. Apparently, it was not the sadistic teenagers behind the four incidents linked to Rage who were at fault for the horrific events, but rather that fault lies with words on a page. Similarly, inanimate objects like knives and guns are often blamed for these occurrences, rather than the people who wield them. The actions of a small number of depraved people are used to restrict the freedoms of the rest of society. After all, plenty of people are able to read books with deranged narrators, watch graphic horror films, and listen to songs with violent lyrics, without feeling the slightest urge to try and recreate the acts depicted. Hundreds of thousands of copies of Rage were published, yet it did not result in hundreds of thousands of school shootings. Similarly, millions of people can, and do, own guns, knives, and other equipment, without using them to carry out atrocities.
RAGE, IMAGE: NSEY BENAJAH
Not only does banning books, films, music, or even guns and knives punish the ordinary people who harmlessly consume such media, or responsibly own such weaponry, but it also shifts the focus away from the more hidden causes of crime. The perpetrators of violent offences often have shared characteristics, which may be contributing to their propensity to commit such acts. Research has shown that the majority of mass shooters have experienced childhood trauma or early exposure to violence, which often caused mental health issues; most reached an identifiable ‘crisis point’ that acted as a trigger in the weeks or months prior to the shooting; and many experienced parental divorce or fatherlessness during their childhood.
In the cases associated with Rage, all criminals were believed to have experienced serious mental health issues. Jeffrey Cox, the 1987 captor, actually first read the novel during his stay in a psychiatric ward. The student behind the 1988 hostage episode was described as “confused” and “unbalanced”. During the week before the 1996 Frontier shooting, Barry Loukaitis was said to have been trapped in a “psychotic delusion”. The perpetrator behind the 1997 Heath High School shooting, Michael Carneal, was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and claims to still hear voices almost three decades later. This implies that their reading of Rage was not the sole motivating factor behind these individuals’ actions. Suggestions to the contrary prevent other underlying issues from being uncovered and addressed.
Yet, even if the perpetrators were not being impacted by other factors, beyond their reading of Rage, this should not cause us to blame the novel for these crimes. Just like how Rage’s Charlie Decker chose to carry out his attack, these offenders freely decided to commit their crimes. They were not forced to do so by Stephen King or his novel. In the same vein, we shouldn’t blame the guns used in each incident. As is the case for every shooting, their firearms did not compel them to enact evil. A gun is no more capable of harm on its own than a book. Therefore, when tackling criminality, we should not be focusing on the weapon fired, but rather who pulled its trigger.
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