xiii, 923 pp. Introduction "The Importance of Being Bachman" by Stephen King; Rage; The Long Walk; Roadwork; The Running Man. "Richard Bachman is a pseudonym used by horror fiction author Stephen King. At the beginning of Stephen King's career, the general view among publishers was such that an author was limited to a book every year at the utmost; any more, it was felt, was not acceptable to the public. King therefore wanted to write under another name in order to double his production. He convinced his publisher, Signet Books, to print these novels under a pseudonym. The originally selected pseudonym was Gus Pillsbury; but at the last moment King changed it to "Richard Bachman" in tribute to crime author Donald E. Westlake's long-running pseudonym Richard Stark, and in honour of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, a band King was listening to at the time. King dedicated Bachman's early books — Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Road Work (1981), and The Running Man (1982) — to people close to him, and worked in obscure references to his own identity. These clues, not to mention the similarity between the two authors' literary styles, aroused the suspicions of horror fans and retailers. King steadfastly denied any connection to Bachman and, to throw fans off the trail, dedicated Bachman's 1984 novel Thinner to "Claudia Inez Bachman", supposedly Bachman's wife. There was also a phony author photo of Bachman on the dustjacket, credited to Claudia. He also has one of the characters describe how the strange happenings are like a "Stephen King" novel in the book. Thinner was Bachman's first title to be published in hardback. It sold 28,000 copies before it became widely known that the author was really Stephen King, whereupon sales went up tenfold. The link became undeniable when a persistent bookstore clerk couldn't believe that Bachman and King were not one and the same, and eventually located publisher's records at the Library of Congress naming King as the author of one of Bachman's novels. This led to a press release heralding Bachman's "death" -- supposedly from "cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia". At the time of the announcement in 1985, King was working on Misery, which he had planned to release as a Bachman book. The Bachman story didn't end with Thinner. In 1996, Bachman's The Regulators came out, with the publishers claiming the book's manuscript was found among Bachman's leftover papers by his widow. Still, it was obvious from the book's packaging and marketing campaign that it was really written by King. There was a picture of a young King on the inside back cover, and the "also by this author" page listed not only works Bachman was credited with writing, but also works he wrote "as Stephen King". The Regulators was released the same day as the King novel Desperation, and the two novels featured many of the same characters; the two book covers were designed to be placed together to form a single picture. Around the time of The Regulators' release, King said that there may be another Bachman novel left to be "found". Recently, King has stated that another Bachman book had been found, with the announcement soon afterwards that his unpublished novel Blaze was being rewritten, edited, and updated for a possible release, although no deal has yet been signed with a publisher. King has taken full ownership of the Bachman name on numerous occasions, as with the republication of the first four Bachman titles as The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King in 1985. The introduction, titled "The Importance of Being Bachman", details the whole Bachman/King story. King used the "relationship" between him and Bachman as a concept in his 1989 book The Dark Half, a story in which a writer's darker pseudonym takes on a life of its own. King dedicated The Dark Half to "the deceased Richard Bachman". Richard Bachman appeared in King's Dark Tower series, albeit indirectly. In the fifth book, Wolves of the Calla, the sinis
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