Roadwork

I mentioned in my last book post that I had gone through and placed holds on pretty much all of the Stephen King books that I had never read before.  They all started coming up available in the last few days for me...all at once. I had to push most of the holds off, and pick one to go with. The first one that came up was Roadwork, written by Stephen King under the name Richard Bachman.

I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of the Bachman books. I used to have the omnibus edition of those that they published a years ago called The Bachman Books. I thought I'd read the whole thing, but I never did get to Roadwork. I only read The Long Walk, Rage and The Runnning Man. I remember being blown away by the ending of The Running Man, considering that it was originally published in 1982 and made into a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1987. ***Spoiler Alert for anyone who hasn't read it*** It ends with a man purposefully crashing a plane into a building to kill the TV execs. That was almost twenty years before 9/11, but I never read it until after. They could never make an accurate movie rendition with an ending like that. Not anymore.

Anyway, it turns out there were four books in The Bachman Books, and Roadwork was the one I had missed. It may be that I did that on purpose. I might have grown tired of the cynicism and dour tone of those books. It seems like writing under a pseudonym gave King the freedom to be as dark and dreary as he wanted without any repercussions to his income.

Every one of those Bachman books were dark, depressing, jaded, and grim. Life sucks. It's not worth living. There is no meaning and there's nothing worth saving. It's no surprise that they all end with dour BD Anklevich-style unhappy endings.

Roadwork was another book in that same tradition. Because of that, it took longer for me to get through it than I had been doing. There was definitely less to get excited about and keep me coming back for more. Luckily, it wasn't that long, so I did make it to the end, but there wasn't a whole lot in it that I found to recommend.

It's kind of funny to hear a review like this from somebody such as myself. I've written too many dark and dreary stories of my own to be complaining about reading one, right?