Roadwork (1981)

By Stephen King

364pp, Fiction

Notes

2023-10-30

What I wrote in an email to Dan

just finished Stephen King's Roadwork at about 4AM this morning (I got the Bachman books anthology and I've been ticking one off every 5 years or so, looking forward to The Running Man in 2028). Probably the worst King I've read unless I've forgotten about something. I guess he was young, but there's also quite a lot of casual sexism/ racism which I didn't feel there was enough distance between author and character to really excuse.

What did occur to me though was that the plot feels just like a JG Ballard novel, right down to the psychedelic trip at a suburban house party. With that frame it's really interesting to see how the two novelists approach the ideas differently, King is always looking for character and motivation and a degree of psychological realism where Ballard just couldn't give a shit about that stuff. In the end I felt like King's approach just couldn't say much about car culture or authority or urbanism any of the other big ideas that the book tries to grapple with because he's so focused on individual people, can't see the wood for the trees. Where King works to generate a degree of sympathy for the main character Ballard would be more interested in working out how the character would develop a degree of sympathy for the system which is grinding him down, also JGB would have made it about a third of the length.

And here's what Dan thought of it back in 2014