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Title: Roadwork by Richard Bachman, Stephen King ISBN: 0-451-19787-9 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: June, 1999 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.58 (24 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: does not work
Comment: this is perhaps my least favorite of SK's horror/thriller. a guy lives where a road is planned. he has to move. his job and marriage gets endangered to, and he decides he wants the roadwork stopped. so he begins taking matters into his own hands. this book doesn't deliver. i got the feeling that the guy was an idiot who deserved what was coming to him, and very little the feeling that the road was to blame. the guy has just sort of given up. i don't feel taht much sympathy for him. i mean: his job is not that great and he endagers it himself, as an example. in the end it all was too little tied up with the roadwork. no great descriptions or psychology either.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not King's Best Work
Comment: I have read several Stephen King books, and I have become very fond of his work. Roadwork is written by King's alternate personality, Richard Bachman. This is the first book that I've read when King is writing as Bachman, and I'm niether impressed nor disappointed. "Roadwork" is about one man's struggle with life. He's broke, falling out of love, and miserable. When he finds out he has to move due to the construction of a highway, he gets...well...pissed off. This is a novel about retribution, and a vindictive middle aged man. It's very non-King, perhaps this is because he was writing as Richard Bachman. The book interested me, because it was one man, planning one act of revenge. It's definitely one of the more intriguing plots I've seen, but it was a little too shallow.
Rating: 4
Summary: A tale of the first energy crisis...
Comment: Roadwork starts off suspensefully, as a crazed man with a knack for carrying on conversations with himself buys a high-caliber rifle and a .44 Magnum revolver. However, the explosive result of this purchase, which you might expect to be soon coming, doesn't arrive until the very end of the book. To get there, we must wade through some very dense, overly-detailed (but very well written) exposition.
Bart Dawes has finally been pushed too far; at age 40, he's lost his only son to a brain tumor, and now the public works commission has decided to build a new highway system, which will not only go through (and thereby erase) the building Bart's worked in for the past twenty years, but also his home. Bart must move, but he refuses to. In the process, Bart will lose his job, his friends, his wife, and his sanity, but he stands strong in his refusal to leave his home, reminiscent in a way of Hank Stamper in Ken Kesey's 'Sometimes a Great Notion.'
Roadwork is different than anything Stephen King (well, Richard Bachman, to be precise) has written; it's more a character study than anything else. As King himself wrote in his 'Why I Was Bachman' introduction to the first edition of The Bachman Books, 'Roadwork is probably the worst of the lot, because it tries so hard to be good.' And that's the whole of it: Roadwork reads like it's been written by a young writer who's trying hard to appeal to the literary crowd. It's verbose, packed with introspection, and moves along at a snail's pace; the total opposite of the Bachman/King extravaganza The Running Man.
It's no surprise that King relates that Roadwork was written at a time when he was trying to impress those elitists whom would ask him at cocktail parties if he'd ever write 'something important.' (Interestingly, in the second edition of the Bachman Books, in a foreword titled 'The Importance of Being Bachman,' King states that Roadwork is now his favorite of the Bachman bunch.)
This is not to say Roadwork is a bad book, or even a boring book. It takes dedication to keep turning those pages when you begin reading it, but in time you adjust to the casual pace of the narrative, you begin to learn (and respect) who Bart Dawes is, and you root for him, no matter how nuts he's become.
The ending finally picks up the pace, as Dawes accepts his fate and brings those guns into play, as well as a generous supply of explosives. In that regard, Roadwork packs the suspenseful punch you'd normally associate with the books under Richard Bachman's name. But with its slow pace, grim view on the world (the Bachman view is generally that life sucks, and terrible things happen for no reason), combined with its firm rooting in the 1970s (which might make it inaccessible to those who weren't around in that decade), Roadwork might not appeal to the average King/Bachman fan. However, for those looking for an intense character study that slowly builds to an explosive climax, it comes recommended.
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Title: The Long Walk by Stephen King, Richard Bachman, Stephen Bachman ISBN: 0451196716 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Running Man by Stephen King, Richard Bachman ISBN: 0451197968 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: August, 1999 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Regulators by Stephen King, Richard Bachman, Charles O. Verrill ISBN: 0451191013 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: 02 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King, Jon Land ISBN: 0451822196 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: April, 1985 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Black House by Peter Straub, Stephen King ISBN: 0345441036 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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