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Roadwork - Richard Bachman

Time bombs among us

How often have you wondered about those unpleasant incidents you see on newspaper? The stuff like "Loony husband kills the whole family and commits suicide", "School shooter takes 3 lives with him", "Shooter in a truck takes the lives of innocent bystanders before blowing vehicle into bits". You get the idea right. We see these stuff in the newspapers and maybe even exclaim for a bit and say "God, what a world we live in now" or just dismiss them as 'work of the devil' and 'mad ravings of the crazies'. I am asking you how often have you wondered about the person committing these kinds of acts. Where is his conscience? Forget conscience. What is going on his mind? What makes someone do such acts? Again you can say that the people committing these acts are loonies. Yes most of them, if they were examined by a Psycho-Analyst would be detected with some sort of mental conditions that led them to these atrocities. But that does not make them some sort of a different 'species'. When we dig in to the past of these men we find that they led a life not unlike the one that we lead now. And then something happened in their lives. Something bad. It is not necessary that it is a single tragedy or a singular breaking point . It can be a sort of punishment that is spread over days and days, slowly deteriorating the person that once had been and turning him into something that his friends and acquaintances does not identify with. The scariest part out of all this is that the shooter in the newspaper of tomorrow could be you.

Stephen King, under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, here tries to make us realize how eerily similar we are to these tragic homo sapiens. Story revolves around George Barton Dawes, an ordinary working man. He led a normal and unremarkable public life working at a laundromat. Now when the new roadwork comes to town, it threatens his livelihood, his his town and all the memories attached with it. So his life takes an unlikely turn, bringing out all the stuff that was buried in his heart for a long time, resulting in the formation of a new man, who at any cost would not let the roadwork go on. But this leads to the disintegration of the protagonist, as he starts having conversations with himself. As we can see from the first page itself. Traumas from about Bart's past unveils as the story goes on. He goes to unexpected places, meets unexpected people. And finally takes a last stand. Unlike other King's works there are little to none supernatural elements or horrors lurking beneath. But there is a real one. Deterioration of a Human Being. We can see that here as vividly as possible.


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