Getting several new Stephen King adaptations in a given year isn’t surprising to horror fans, but this year has an added dimension of intrigue for longtime Constant Readers. Two of the King films released in 2025 – The Long Walk and The Running Man – were originally released under a different name.
Beginning in 1977, King adopted the pen name Richard Bachman when his publishers advised him against releasing more than one novel a year under his given name. So, Bachman was born, and for a while, got to live his own fictional life separate from King. Bachman released five novels – Rage in 1977, The Long Walk in 1979, Roadwork in 1981, The Running Man in 1982, and Thinner in 1984 – without ever being linked to King. By 1985, the game was up after a bookstore clerk realized the two writers read similarly, then went to the Library of Congress to confirm his suspicions.
Since then, despite King’s outing as Bachman, Bachman himself has taken on a life of his own. Due to its connection to a school shooting, Rage is no longer in print, but the other Bachman books remain in circulation, and King even released a couple of additional stories under the pen name. The Regulators, a companion novel to King’s Desperation, landed in 1996, and Blaze, a 1970s-written book King released as a “found” novel from the now-deceased Bachman, arrived in 2007. Among King’s fans, Bachman has come to represent a repository for King’s pulpier novels, ones with a harder exploitation edge, usually driven by a high-concept premise. He’s got his own fanbase among King’s readers, and King himself even played “Richard Bachman” on Sons of Anarchy back in 2010. Now, despite years of lying dormant, Bachman’s legacy is getting a new chapter courtesy of a very unconventional project.
Stephen King as Richard Bachman in “Sons of Anarchy”
Beginning November 19, indie horror publisher Bad Hand Books will release the first issue of The End Times, a post-apocalyptic story told through 12 issues of a community newspaper in the fictional town of North End. Written by Benjamin Percy, the series was inspired, in part, by King’s own serialized novels like The Green Mile and The Plant, and in an interview with Bloody Disgusting, Percy noted he saw other links to King’s work from the beginning.
“I was thinking about big swings that King had taken with Riding the Bullet and The Plant, and I was thinking especially of The Stand, which is essentially the world in which The End Times takes place,” Percy said.
With the feeling of King’s influence gnawing at him, Percy decided to reach out to King to see if he might be interested in being part of The End Times. What happened next is a dream come true for pretty much any horror writer on the planet.
“I finally got the guts to shoot him an email, thinking the worst he can say is no,” Percy said. “He said yes, because he’s an incredibly generous guy, and it’s been such a pleasure and honor to be able to collaborate with a hero of mine. I am that Constant Reader. I grew up worshiping at the altar of King, and it’s amazing to be in conversation with him.”
‘The End Times’ cartoon by Matt Bowers, courtesy of Bad Hand Books
So, how does Richard Bachman figure into all of this? Well, in an early issue of The End Times, as first reported by Fangoria, Bachman’s surname makes an appearance, and a supporting character in his life takes center stage. Bachman’s wife, Claudia Inez Bachman, who is thanked in all of his books, emerges as a character in The End Times, creating an unlikely continuation of the Bachman legacy. How did that happen?
“When I talked to King, I was like, ‘My name’s not going to appear in the newspaper. Your name’s not going to appear in the newspaper,’” Percy explained. “He threw out the idea of Claudia Inez Bachman, which was a wild moment, because if you’re a Constant Reader, you know that all those Bachman books are dedicated to Claudia.“
But Claudia is not just the silent wife of a writer. Much like King’s own wife, novelist Tabitha King, she’s a writer herself, and that’s already a canonical part of King’s universe. In the multiverse of King’s The Dark Tower saga, Bachman (under the name Claudia y Inez Bachman) wrote the children’s book Charlie the Choo-Choo in Roland Deschain’s universe. Is that the same Claudia Bachman we find in The End Times? Percy’s not telling, but it sounds like we’ll get to know Mrs. Bachman very soon.
“She writes an introduction to herself in the paper, and she introduces herself as coming from New England,” Percy explained. “She talks about her husband. She talks about what she’s been up to over the past 12 years, because this is a time of reconstruction. Our story doesn’t take place as the world is falling apart. It takes place as the world is building itself back up. So, I don’t want to get too much into it for the reasons of spoilers, but there’s a whole established backstory there, and she also has some secrets which she carries with her.“
We don’t know what secrets Claudia Bachman carries, and what, if any, relationship they have to her more famous fictional husband, but it’s very interesting that her name is coming up at a time when Bachman’s stories are gaining fresh traction in pop culture. It’s been more than a decade since we heard from Richard Bachman, and now he’s back in the limelight alongside his spouse. What does that say about the lasting legacy and impact of King’s alter ego?
“If you look at the, let’s say, the acerbic quality of a Richard Bachman novel, look at it with the backdrop of 2025,” Percy said. “Here you have, in The Running Man, an authoritarian government and a population that takes pleasure in cruelty. It finds voyeuristic pleasure in seeing other people run for their lives. Here, you have The Long Walk, which tells the story of a country that sacrifices its underclass. In the case of The End Times, there are certainly some parallels when you look at attacks on the press, the rise of disinformation and misinformation, and the heroic act of journalists.
“So The End Times has that knife’s edge to it, but ultimately, this is a story that’s hopeful. It’s important to note that Claudia Bachman is not Richard Bachman. I mentioned that she carries secrets with her. I’ll also say that she speaks, in her introductory letter, about how her marriage was not a happy one. So, their voices are distinct and their outlook is distinct. And again, I won’t say too much about her arc over the course of this story, but we’re both channeling Bachman and reinventing things.”
Reach an excerpt from The End Times below.
The End Times launches November 19 from Bad Hand Books.
Excerpt courtesy of Bad Hand Books
The post In a Big Year for Richard Bachman, the Legacy of Stephen King’s Pen Name Grows with ‘The End Times’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
