That line dividing King from Bachman collapsed with Thinner, which throws its hat firmly into the supernatural ring almost from the first. King's work at this point utilised more traditional horror tropes – the haunted or possessed whatevers that drove the stories along. Rage, Running Man, The Long Walk, Roadwork: while they might trip into SF territory, they all exist by focusing on the human side of their protagonists, backing them into corners and making them fight their way out. The four Bachman books were about broken, trapped men, desperately clinging to humanity while the world they inhabited pushed them further away from it. Until this point, Bachman wrote human stories. But before it: a novel that summed up the rest of King's Bachman-attributed output, while adding in just enough evidence of its real author to raise suspicions. But all things have to come to an end, and soon after Thinner was released, that end arrived. So, the pseudonym had been necessary to stop King looking suspiciously prolific. We're on entry 19 now in this rereading experiment, and yet only 10 years into King's career. But he was writing faster than publishers could cope with. He couldn't put a foot wrong: bestseller begat bestseller. By 1984, everything that King wrote was selling by the truckload. His voice – rich in language, nasty in tone – was never going to be a bestseller, really, but King's was. Richard Bachman could only have lived so long, I suppose.
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