Personally, I don’t consider King’s withdrawal of “Rage” any big loss to the literary community. For a story about a school shooting/hostage situation, it really sucks.
A story like this should be a tense page-turner, or an unsettling screed that makes you think about what rage can compel people to do. Instead, “Rage” is a boring, implausible slog.
This kid murders two teachers, and his classmates are fine with it. They just sit talking with their captor for hours about how crappy their lives are. The whole thing becomes a pissing contest about teenage angst.
Luckily, King got a lot better at story telling later on.
I own an LP copy with the original cover I bought in the mid 80s, and I’m a bit uncomfortable about it. Just as I am about Led Zep’s cover of “Houses Of The Holy”.
Robert Crumb’s early comics about incest and underage rape have aged really poorly. We still have our collection of underground comics we bought back in the 70s, but I can’t look at them now because of Crumb’s and other artists’ works on these same subjects.
Bringing Up Father (aka Jiggs and Maggie) is another example where the wife hitting the husband with a frying pan or other heavy object was a common joke.
Another work that got pulled because of the 9/11 attack was Microsoft’s Fight Simulator. The version that was on the market in 2001 let you pilot a plane around NYC and one of the top stunts you could try was to fly between the two towers (it was even on the box cover). Of course, it was a difficult achievement and often times you would crash your plane into one of the buildings rather than successfully flying between them.