Roadwork

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This article is about a Stephen King novel. For the Edgar Winter album, see Roadwork (album).

Roadwork is a novel by Stephen King, published in 1981 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

The story takes place in an unnamed New England city in the 1970's. Barton George Dawes, grieving over the death of his son and the disintegration of his marriage, is driven off the deep end when he finds that both his home and his business are going to be condemned to make way for the construction of a new interstate highway.

In the introduction to the novel in the collection The Bachman Books King states his disappointment with the work and that a lot of the novel's seemingly melodramatic touches were attempts by him to come to terms with his own mother's death around the time of writing. King states that he was in two minds about reprinting it but decided to in the end in order to give readers an insight into his personality at the time.

In a much later introduction to the second edition of the Bachman books, "The Importance of Being Bachman" King changed his mind and stated that it was his favorite of the books.

In the introduction to the first collected works The Bachman Books, King states in his essay "Why I Was Bachman", "I think it was an effort to make some sense of my mother's painful death the year before - a lingering cancer had taken her off inch by painful inch. Following this death I was left both grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it all... Roadwork tries so hard to be good and find some answers to the conundrum of human pain."