Roadwork

Roadwork was published in 1981 as a paperback original under the name Richard Bachman, the pseudonym Stephen King used for a set of novels that were darker and more tightly wound than the books appearing under his own name. It was collected in The Bachman Books in 1985 alongside Rage, The Long Walk and The Running Man, which is how most readers now find it. The novel is set in an unnamed midwestern city between 1972 and 1974, and it is written from inside a single consciousness.

The book is a study of grief expressed as refusal. Dawes is not a detective and there is no crime to solve in the ordinary sense: the plot is the collision between a man who has decided not to cooperate with a civic process and a city that has the law on its side. King writes the demolition of the house as a series of administrative steps, each of which Dawes understands perfectly and none of which he accepts, and the middle of the novel is the long stretch in which the reader watches him prepare.

The Bachman books are the ones King has described as angrier, and this is the most grounded of them: no supernatural element, no monster, and an ending that follows from the character rather than from a rule of the genre. The pseudonym was made public in 1985 and the books were reissued under King's name, which is why the same novel appears on shelves with two different authors on the cover.