Oculus Presents: A really... interesting new purchase

Hey, everyone, this is Oculus Presents.

Welp... I guess I own this now.

For those of you who don't speak German: this is a German-language edition of the infamous Stephen King novel Rage, published in 1977 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman (my German copy is dated 1995, and is a reprint of an earlier translation). Rage has achieved some uncomfortable notoriety in horror circles as being, to this date, the only Stephen King novel he personally had pulled from print (don't get me wrong, copies can be found, but it's a novel of his you won't see getting a new edition any time soon). And when Stephen "I wrote a story about self-cannibalism" King feels he's crossing a line, you know you're in for some harrowing stuff.

Let's not beat around the bush: Rage is a novel about a school shooting, and the reason why King let it fall out of print is because it has become associated with real-life tragedies similar to its plot. I've never read it, nor did I particularly feel like it until lately - I like boundary-pushing fiction as much as the next guy, but fictionalized tragedies make me feel uncomfortable as hell. I don't feel like horror has a moral responsibility towards its fans because that would be a real after-school special kind of view of the genre, but there are some topics I simply do not feel like reading about when I'm trying to have fun (well, a given definition of "fun", seeing how horror usually aims to stir some darker emotions). Especially because those topics are usually chosen and handled by hack authors only aiming to shock and disgust, with all the tact and delicacy of a rabid elephant.

But this copy of the book has been beckoning at me from a used bookshop for months now, man. As a sort of horror and genre fiction collector, the idea of owning a copy of this notorious King novel, even in a foreign-language edition, had a sort of odd appeal to me. And I ended up giving in to that. I don't actually speak German despite studying it in middle school, and like I said, this novel wasn't very high on my TBR list anyway; but I do aim to learn the language, if only for the sake of reading Amok someday. Am I gonna enjoy it if I do? Probably not. But now I've gotta, I guess.