Stephen King is standing on a street corner in New York City. It’s March, 1974. He’s just had lunch with his editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, who is publishing Carrie. It’s coming out soon. Thompson has asked King what book he wanted to write after Carrie and King sent him two manuscripts. One is a novel about vampires taking over a small town in Maine. It will eventually be published as ‘Salem’s Lot. Thompson thinks that while the other book King sent is more literary, he liked the one with the vampires more. He tells him he wants to go with it. King agrees. A few months later, Carrie will come out. A little over a year later, ‘Salem’s Lot will come out. Seven years later, in March, 1981, the other “more literary” novel will come out under the name Richard Bachman. It’s called Roadwork.
King most likely wrote his first draft of Roadwork during the winter of 1973. Despite the sale of Carrie, The Kings were still living near the edge. They’d moved into a double-wide trailer on the other side of Bangor to save money. King was teaching at Hampden Academy, writing in the laundry closet of the trailer where he balanced a child’s desk on his knees, with Tabitha’s Olivetti typewriter balanced on top of that. The kids needed medicine King couldn’t often afford, despite the occasional windfall check from publishing. King needed cigarettes which cost $5/week they didn’t have, they all needed food, heating oil, the car needed a new transmission...money got tighter and tighter and the Kings couldn’t stretch their dollars far enough to make ends meet. It didn’t help that King would sometimes drink away the grocery money in a binge, unable to help himself.
And that’s how he wrote Roadwork, the story of a husband who loses everything — his wife, his job, his house, his self-respect, and finally his life — because the world is throwing challenges at him he just can’t handle anymore. If The Long Walk was a book about not giving up, and going on in the face of impossible odds, even if it killed you, Roadwork was a book about giving up. A book about quitting. A book about enjoying the brief warmth of the fire as you burnt your last bridge.
Bart Dawes is a middle-aged, middle class man who works as a manager at an industrial laundry (the same kind of place where King had worked) that’s moving to a new facility, and the city is about to demolish his neighborhood to build a highway extension. He tells his wife, Mary, that he’s working on finding them a new home. He tells his boss, Steve Ordner, that he’s working on purchasing land for a new facility. Instead, for reasons he doesn’t quite understand himself, he does neither. Instead, he starts buying guns. He doesn’t know why, it just feels right.
He’s running out the string and it can’t last much longer. When his wife finds out he hasn’t started looking for a new house she leaves him and asks for a divorce. When his boss finds out he never made an offer on the lot for the new laundry and now it’s been bought by somebody else, he fires him. Dawes fights the city, they bug his house, he makes friends with a local crime kingpin who supplies him with explosives, he sleeps with a hitchhiker, but the city keeps coming, and time keeps running out, and Dawes keeps refusing to leave his house.
Despite being written at maximum emotional volume (Dawes wakes up on the verge of screaming more than once, delivers a lot of hysterical laughter, and does a lot of ugly crying) this is a book about a paralyzed man. He won’t leave his house, but at the same time he can’t stay. He’s stuck. Watching a middle-aged man have a breakdown is not the most exciting thing to read, but King does his best to keep it mortifyingly entertaining. When Dawes is invited to a Christmas party where his wife will be he decides it’s a good time to try mescaline for the first time and the results are an exercise in apocalyptic public humiliation. In a scene that will make any sane person’s skin crawl, Dawes calls his boss when he needs him most and, instead of showing remorse, he tells his boss exactly what he thinks of him. It’s a scene that will be replayed beat by excruciating beat in King’s The Shining. Both times, it’s awful to read.
Written in a tone of steadily mounting hysteria and exhaustion, the narrator’s mind not quite clinging to reality, Roadwork feels a bit like The Tommyknockers, except in that book the narrator is the only sane character as everyone around him loses their minds under the influence of alien brain rays, and in Roadwork the only person losing their mind is Dawes. But it also shares The Tommyknocker’s obsession with energy. In The Tommyknockers, nuclear power sits in the middle of the book, its sick green radiation leaking into every character’s lives. In Roadwork the energy crisis looms over everything, creeping into every conversation, finding its way into every scene.
The other thing that links Roadwork to The Tommyknockers is cancer. King’s mother, Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, was diagnosed with uterine cancer in August, 1973 around the time King was working on this book. She died in February, 1974, eight months later, right after King had sold Carrie to Doubleday. In Roadwork the cracks in Mary and Bart’s marriage appeared when their five-year-old son, Charlie, died inexplicably of a brain tumor. Dawes still talks to Charlie in his head, referring to him by his nickname, Freddie. Mary is grief stricken but she moves forward with her life, trying to heal. Dawes, on the other hand, can’t. He’s stuck, clinging to the wreckage of their marriage and their house.
King’s two kids got sick a lot, and it was often only a sudden check from a short story sale that allowed the Kings to buy the medicine they needed. You feel that impotence seeping through Dawes’ pores like hot lava. But Dawes is impotent in so many other ways, too. At one point he firebombs the highway project and the city just brings in new equipment and keeps working. You can’t stop the spread of the highway or the spread of Charlie’s brain tumor and, in the epilogue, it’s revealed that the highway project was as mindless as Charlie’s cancer. The project wasn’t needed. The city simply had to build a certain number of miles of new road each year or it risked losing federal funds.
“Today a walnut,” Dawes thinks, considering the size of his son’s tumor. “Tomorrow the world, the creeping unknown. The incredible dying son. What was there to understand.”
Dawes can’t win. He can’t beat the highway, he can’t beat cancer, he can’t even save his marriage, or keep his job, or leave his house. None of the characters in the Bachman books can win, and their sacrifices are all in vain. As their epilogues or last chapters show us, no one even notices their deaths. The world doesn’t care. In his introduction to the collected edition of the Bachman books, King wrote that when he wrote them, “I was still callow enough to believe in oversimple motivations…and unhappy endings.” He calls Roadwork his attempt to write a “straight” novel, and says that it was an effort to make some sense of his mother’s painful death the year before. He writes that he suspects “Roadwork is probably the worst of the lot simply because it tries so hard to be good and to find some answers to the conundrum of human pain.”
I wouldn’t call Roadwork the worst of the lot, but it’s definitely the end of the road. Physically, each Bachman books had gotten bigger than the one before — from a teenager in a classroom, to a bunch of teenagers on the road, to a middle-aged man fighting city hall — but emotionally they got tighter, more claustrophobic, more despairing, choking on their own rage, trapped in a dead end, paralyzed. Then came The Running Man to blow everything wide open.