His mother had died of cancer just one year before it was written.

King himself once thought it the worst of the early Bachmans, although he later changed his mind and declared it his favourite – perhaps because of the personal pain out of which the novel sprang. It didn’t get made into a film with the Governator. It doesn’t have a young-adult focus like the infamous Rage or the notable (and remarkable) The Long Walk. But Roadwork remains the outlier, the neglected volume, the little-known title. Rage occupies a peculiar place in King’s canon because it is now out of print because of its association with several real-life high-school shootings The Long Walk is a fascinating precursor to The Hunger Games, with a film adaptation apparently in the offing and The Running Man is familiar to many people who haven’t read the novel thanks to the (very different) film adaptation with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Which may be my favourite example of literary irony.) The four early books were collected in the bumper omnibus edition The Bachman Books : Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man. (One reviewer of Thinner, unaware that Bachman was really Stephen King, remarked that it was ‘what Stephen King would write if Stephen King could write’. King published four early novels under the name Richard Bachman, before his fifth outing under the pseudonym, Thinner, led to his cover being blown when a journalist noted the stylistic similarities between ‘Stephen King’ and ‘Richard Bachman’.

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