The Long Walk by Richard Bachman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I feel like an idiot because for the last few weeks I’ve been walking around saying, “This Stephen King character can really spin a yarn!”
This is truly an excellent book. Riveting, takes no time whatsoever to get started, and it just gives you this dark sense of what’s coming to the point you want to read on and find out what happens, but you also kind of don’t because as you read, more of the walkers die off. Like if you didn’t read, they would be still alive, sort of, but doomed to this eternity of haggard walking. You HAVE to finish it despite yourself.
I don’t know why everyone is remaking the same bullshit movies and we don’t have this yet.
There’s an intro to this book about Stephen King and his pseudonym, Richard Bachman, who wrote this book. Apparently it was a little more than just an extra name for King.
There was the economic reasoning. King’s publisher, Signet, wouldn’t allow King to put out more than one book a year for fear of destroying the market. I feel like time and James Patterson have conspired to make Signet look kinda stupid on that one. I also feel like a year is probably, at least at the time, when book sales fall off. You’ve got your initial hardcover run for a few months, paperback, and then most everyone has seen it in the grocery store and either picked it up or not. Maybe too quick an interval fucks with that rhythm.
There was also King’s desire to see if he was actually talented or if the sort of “Stephen King” brand was what sold books. He never got a satisfactory answer as he was outed a little too early. A bookstore clerk was allegedly reading an advanced copy of Thinner, decided it sounded Kingly, and did a little research. He found out that Bachman and King were represented by the same agent, and then looked up the copyright records for Bachman’s books in the Library of Congress. The copyright for Rage was under King’s name, and the pseudonym died.
It’s interesting to note that King’s son, Joe Hill, aka Joseph Hillstrom King, did the same thing, writing under the pseudonym Joe Hill in order to find out whether he had the chops or if it was being the son of Stephen King that got you published. This also didn’t last long. Right around the publication of Heart-Shaped Box, Hill was outed, although he felt it was inevitable as he’d given a reading where he felt the family resemblance was noted.
When I told people I was reading my first Stephen King, a lot of joking “That doesn’t count. It’s a Bachman.” And King DID say, in the introduction to this book, that he considered Bachman a bit of a different personality, someone he could inhabit and write a little differently.
It brings up the whole question of the pseudonym. Or the adopted personality.
It almost never seems to work, to stay a secret anyway.
Beyonce was Sasha Fierce, which wasn’t so much a secret as a personality she used for her stage persona because, as she said, her stage self is “too aggressive, too strong, too sassy and too sexy.” Yes, we all have these problems. I’m just too damn strong and sexy all the time… I guess Fierce was “killed” by Beyonce in 2010 because she didn’t need her anymore. She’d found a way to deal with being so strong and sexy.
JK Rowling adopted the JK as a means of hiding her gender to attract boy readers, and then published under the name Robert Galbraith. Rowling was outed when an anonymous tweet started the ball rolling on some research similar to that done to out Stephen King as Bachman. So she kinda had TWO bouts.
There’s Chris Gaines, which I think we were supposed to know was Garth Brooks. I don’t know how to categorize that one, really.
There’s the JT Leroy thing, which is different because it was a non-famous person who created this persona, and the non-famous person claimed that this persona allowed for some artistic channeling and freedom, but it seemed to many others to be a way of profiting. I suppose it could be both, but artsy types tend to get touchy when something that’s art turns profitable.
There’s the thoroughly uninteresting ones where a dipstick just changes their name. REALLY!? This dude wasn’t BORN as Vin Diesel? Wow, shocker.
But no matter what, it seems that these don’t last, or they aren’t fully accepted.
It may be impossible, at least in modern times. Oddly, it’s more difficult, in some ways, to be anonymous in this time of anonymity. My take: anonymity only exists when someone doesn’t actually care who you are. When you’re a nobody, that’s anonymity. You can sign your name to everything you do, and you’re still fairly anonymous because who gives a hot damn? When you’re somebody, it’s very difficult to regain your anonymity because people care what you’re up to.
The thing is, publishing traditionally can’t be anonymous anymore because author personalities are becoming as important as their works. Which I think sucks. Not because it’s holding authors to a certain standard or something. But because I’m not really a believer in the idea that the author with the best personality is the author who will write the best book. Just like I don’t think the nicest people write the best pop music and the kindest person tells the funniest jokes. Sometimes, yes. Always, no. I believe history is filled with problematic artists who created great works. It’s sort of a shame that, for now, this doesn’t have a space to exist.
On the other hand…I would think that if a JK Rowling wanted to, she could quite easily create an account and throw something up on the Kindle store. That would be true anonymity. It’s not achievable if you’re going through an agent, even in going up in print. There’s no such thing as ONE person knowing your secret in that case. And when there are economic factors at work, when a Robert Galbraith sells 1,500 copies, you gotta look at Stephen King and say, “Damn, when he was outed as Bachman, sales of Thinner went through the goddamn roof.” It would be a tough secret to keep for everyone except the one individual who saw more benefit to the experiment regarding his art than he did to sales.
I would just fucking love to find out that some author working today was the pseudonym of another famous author. Maybe we will.