Rage

Rage is a novel by the American writer Stephen King, published in 1977 under his Richard Bachman pseudonym. It was the first of his books to appear under that name.

The story takes place in Placerville, Maine, in May 1976. Charlie Decker, a high school senior, is called to a meeting with his principal about what happened two months earlier, when he struck a chemistry teacher with a pipe wrench hard enough to put the man in hospital. Charlie insults the principal until he is expelled, then leaves the office, takes a pistol out of his locker, sets fire to the rest of what is in it and walks into his algebra class.

The rest of the novel stays inside the classroom, over the hours in which Charlie deals with the authorities outside in his own fashion and the students inside begin to talk to each other in ways they never had before. The book was collected in the 1985 omnibus The Bachman Books, and after a number of real school shootings were connected to it King allowed it to go out of print rather than keep it in circulation.