One of Stephen King's novels, Rage, can no longer be found as it's out of print due to the controversy around it. Here's what happened.

Stephen King is the mind behind many beloved and scary stories, but there’s one novel that stopped being printed due to the controversy it drew – and here’s what happened. Stephen King has rightfully earned the title of the King of Horror thanks to his many novels and short stories from the horror genre, though he has also explored other genres like western (The Dark Tower), sci-fi (The Tommyknockers), drama, and even fantasy (The Eyes of the Dragon), and many of his works have been adapted to other media, sometimes more than once.

Stephen King’s career as a writer began in 1967 when he sold his first professional short story, “The Glass Floor”, to Startling Mysteries. He continued writing and selling short stories to men’s magazines, and many of them were later republished in the collection Night Shift. Between 1966 and 1970, King wrote a draft for The Long Walk and an anti-war novel titled Sword in the Darkness, of which only The Long Walk was eventually published. In 1973, King’s first novel (though actually the fourth he wrote) was published: Carrie, which initially sold modestly and became a bestseller after Brian De Palma’s 1976 movie adaptation. His following novel was ‘Salem’s Lot in 1975, and his third novel, The Shining (1977) established him as a preeminent author in the horror genre.

Since then, King has brought a variety of horror stories for the audience to explore different types of fears and meet all types of monsters and creatures, such as in Cujo (with a rabid Saint Bernard), Christine (a possessed car), IT (an evil, shapeshifting creature from another dimension), and Under the Dome (where a city is trapped in a glass dome-like barrier). Of course, King’s works haven’t been safe from controversy, the most notable one being a certain scene in IT involving Bev Marsh and her friends from the Losers Club, but there’s one novel that was so controversial due to its theme that it’s now out of print: Rage, published under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman.

At the beginning of King’s career as an author, publishers limited authors to one published book per year, and in order to increase his publication without oversaturating the market, King adopted the pseudonym “Richard Bachman”. The first novel published under that name was Rage (originally titled Getting It On), a psychological thriller published in 1977. Rage follows high school student Charlie Decker, who after an incident that sent his chemistry teacher to the hospital and insulting the principal led to his expulsion, took a pistol from his locker and shot his algebra teacher while holding his classmates hostage. Unfortunately, Rage was associated with real high school shooting incidents in the 1980s and 1990s, such as the 1988 incident at San Gabriel High School in California, the 1989 incident at Jackson County High School in Kentucky, the 1993 shooting at East Carter High School in Kentucky, the 1996 shooting at Frontier Middle School in Washington, and the 1997 shooting at Heath High School in Kentucky. In all those cases, the perpetrators had read Rage, and one of them had even written an essay on it.

After the 1997 incident, King decided to allow Rage to fall out of print in the United States, and was only available as part of the collection The Bachman Books, though new editions of it don’t include it anymore. In a footnote to the preface of the novel Blaze, King wrote that Rage was “now out of print, and a good thing”, and he later described his inspiration for stories like Rage as drawing heavily upon his own frustrations and pains as a high school student, but he admits the role that cultural and artistic products play in influencing troubled individuals. Of course, copies of Rage are now highly sought-after by collectors and fans, but it takes a lot of luck and money to get a copy of the controversial novel. Stephen King’s Rage is just one of many pieces of media linked to real-life tragedies, further feeding the seemingly never-ending debate on whether movies, TV shows, books, and even songs can be pointed out as responsible for driving people to commit crimes.

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