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

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Title Roadwork

Roadwork cover
Author	Stephen King
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Drama
Publisher
Released	1981

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

The story takes place in an unnamed 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.

The novel starts with a "man on the street interview" where Barton, currently unknown, gives his acidic opinion of the extension to the highway. (He will meet with this reporter again at the end of the book, neither man recognizing the other.) Barton then begins, even seemingly unaware of his own actions, to purchase weaponry to defend himself. As the book progresses, it reveals that his son had succumbed to an inoperable brain tumor, and that Barton is unable (or unwilling) to sever the emotional tie between him and his dead son, who is tied to the house he lives in. His wife is aware of the order to demolish their house and cannot understand why he is unwilling to finalize the sale, eventually leaving him alone in the house. He quits his job after making some disastrous decisions involving the purchase of a new facility for the laundry business he works for. He experiments with a hallucinogen given to him at a party and picks up a female hitchhiker, who decides to stay at his home and chooses to seduce him later in the night by sneaking into his bed. He opens a working relationship with a auto dealer with ties to the Mob, to purchase explosives and the use of his services to sweep his house for listening devices. He even makes an initial attack on the construction equipment, using Molotov cocktails to burn the big machines. Throughout the novel, he systematically severs ties with all connections to the community, until the last day runs out, and his house is scheduled for demolition.

The police come to escort him from the house and he fires on them with a .460 Weatherby Magnum hunting rifle, damaging a police car, and attracting the attention of the media. He agrees to leave the house after a reporter is allowed to enter the house and speak to him. After the reporter leaves, Barton tosses out his guns and sets off the explosives he bought, destroying the house with him inside it.

The epilogue describes what happens after--some secrets are revealed about the extension, about the city's attempt to try and cheat Barton's widowed wife out of the money she got from the sale of the house, about the fact that there was no real reason for the extension--the city would lose budget money for transportation projects if they did not spend it on projects like the extension.

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."

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