Out, Out, Damned Plot!

Here's a list, via io9, of ten authors who repudiated some of their own books.

The list is kind of interesting, and shows how more than a few writers have ambivalent relationships with some of their most famous work. It also shows a little counter-productivity. Stephen King asked that his pseudonymous 1970s suspense novel Rage, about a high-school shooting, go out of print after a couple of actual such shootings in the mid-1990s. So a copy of the paperback's first printing now goes for almost $900 on eBay. Like the initial limited printings of The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, the scarcity of the work has raised its profile rather than pushed it to the background.

King would probably have been a lot better off letting Blockade Billy go out of print. Or Under the Dome, or Wizard and Glass, or Duma Key, or The Regulators...

Sisyphus, please call your office.