{"id":1639,"date":"2019-08-21T15:00:52","date_gmt":"2019-08-21T21:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=1639"},"modified":"2019-08-04T20:05:09","modified_gmt":"2019-08-05T02:05:09","slug":"book-roadwork-1981","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2019\/08\/21\/book-roadwork-1981\/","title":{"rendered":"BOOK: Roadwork (1981)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Roadwork\"Roadwork
\n<\/u><\/strong>Year: 1981
\nAuthor: Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King)
\nLength: 577 minutes \/ 9.62 hours<\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t aware of Stephen King\u2019s Richard Bachman pseudonym until I picked up this book to read on a whim. While it\u2019s clear all of King\u2019s technical prowess is still present in Bachman\u2019s work, the \u201cking of horror\u201d gained a chance to write outside his genre. Of course, King has done this before with a few different books (like Hearts in Atlantis<\/em><\/a>, The Green Mile<\/em><\/a>, and The Dark Tower<\/em><\/a> series), but writing under a pseudonym seemed to unleash an amount of cynicism I\u2019ve hardly seen in King\u2019s writing before.<\/p>\n

Written in the early 1980s, Roadwork<\/em> exhibits all the identifying marks of a cynic who has been over-saturated with consumerism. The need to have a job to support a family by buying a house that needs to be filled with the accouterments of modern living is a bit too much for some people. This is especially true for those who don\u2019t quite meet the standard of the \u201cAmerican dream\u201d in their own mind and have no other course other than to wallow in self-pity. By now, it\u2019s practically a tale as old as the industrial revolution. Unfortunately, this means Roadwork<\/em> doesn\u2019t stand out much in my mind as an original story.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Roadwork<\/em> was one-of-a-kind back when King wrote it, but I doubt that was the case. Heck, the beat poets of the \u201860s and \u201870s certainly wrote about separating themselves from the toxic consumerism shoved down their throats. Roadwork<\/em> almost felt like a \u201cpaint by number\u201d novel that covered all the basic items in a story of this kind, checking each box until it reaches its obvious and inevitable conclusion. While it was nice to read something by Stephen King that wasn\u2019t necessarily beholden to the fame of his name, I\u2019m not sure if I would have read it if he wasn\u2019t attached to it at all.<\/p>\n

A so-so cynical work that is hardly original enough to mention, I give Roadwork<\/em> 2.5 stars out of 5.<\/p>\n

\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" \"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" 1\/2<\/strong><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roadwork Year: 1981 Author: Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King) Length: 577 minutes \/ 9.62 hours I wasn\u2019t aware of Stephen King\u2019s Richard Bachman pseudonym until I picked up this book to read on a whim. While it\u2019s clear all of King\u2019s technical prowess is still present in Bachman\u2019s work, the \u201cking of horror\u201d gained a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,54],"tags":[668,1960,55,1959,1958,8,1957,1956,963],"class_list":["post-1639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-5-stars","category-book","tag-668","tag-american-dream","tag-book","tag-consumerism","tag-cynic","tag-review","tag-richard-bachman","tag-roadwork","tag-stephen-king"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1639"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1641,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639\/revisions\/1641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}