Roadwork
- 362
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
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Our view
Bleak and inward-looking, “Roadwork” studies a grieving man coming apart as a highway extension closes in on his home and workplace. The highway is the occasion and not the subject: what interests King is one man up against an impersonal system. Some readers who expected dark comedy found a far more hopeless book, and some remain unconvinced that the idea fully works. King published it as Richard Bachman.
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
Roadwork is a thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1981 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books. The story takes place in an unnamed city of the Midwestern United States in 1972–1974. Grieving over the death of his son and the disintegration of his marriage, a man is driven to mental instability when he learns that both his home and his workplace will be demolished to make way for an extension to an interstate highway.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 6.5 across 167 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 53% 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 | 7.3 | 11 | 7% |
| Hardcover | 6.5 | 156 | 93% |
Frequently asked
How long is Roadwork?
It has 362 pages — shorter than 84% 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 6.9 and 7.1, closest to this book.
