Richard Bachman (b. 1977; d. 1985) was an author of horror fiction, and the husband of Claudia y Inez Bachman. He is the pseundonym fashioned by Stephen King to circumvent the conventional wisdom of the 1970's and 1980's that claimed that genre authors could release no more than one book per year.
Background
He was quite nearly named Gus Pillsbury after King's mother's father, but was ultimately named after Donald Westlake's pseudonym "Richard Stark" and the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
Having published five novels, Bachman "died" in 1985 of "cancer of the pseudonym" after he was discovered, and his death served as the inspiraton for King's 1989 novel The Dark Half. Two further "trunk novels," written by Bachman, were "discovered" by Claudia and subsequently published; the first of them, The Regulators, was released in conjunction with Desperation, as the two books presented different versions of the same story and cast of characters.
The second "trunk novel" was, in fact, a reworked manuscript that had been turned down by Doubleday in order to publish `Salem's Lot.
Novels
- Rage (1977)
- The Long Walk (1979)
- Roadwork (1981)
- The Running Man (1982)
- Thinner (1984)
- The Regulators (1996), posthumous
- Blaze (2007), posthumous