Rage
- 274
- Pages
- about 5 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“Rage” is a short, uncomfortable early Stephen King novel about a school shooting and how quickly order falls apart around it. King published it under the Richard Bachman name and later let it go out of print after it was linked to real attacks. Some readers find the opening strained and the book stronger once it turns to group psychology; others say it feeds the stereotype of the school shooter who kills for no reason.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Rage is a psychological thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, the first he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It was published in 1977 and was collected in the 1985 hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books. The novel describes a school shooting, and has been associated with several real-life high school shooting incidents in the 1980s and 1990s. In response, King allowed the novel to fall out of print. In 2013, in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, King published the anti-firearms violence essay Guns.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 6.8 across 317 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 68% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Thriller average of 7.6. That is how 7.0 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.2 | 20 | 6% |
| Hardcover | 6.8 | 297 | 94% |
Frequently asked
How long is Rage?
It has 274 pages — shorter than 97% of the ranked books in Thriller.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Thriller — with scores between 7.0 and 7.1, closest to this book.
