One of the most prominent figures in modern horror Stephen King has built a career on more than sixty novels, hundreds of short stories, and countless characters. But there is one story that he no longer wants anyone to read.

A novel he released under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, Rage was first published in 1977. It's a psychological thriller like many others, centred on a teenager who walks into school to shoot a teacher and keep fellow students hostage.

For decades, it went unnoticed and blended with King's earlier experimental works. It was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s that it began to take on a new life.

A pattern began to emerge in which multiple school shooters in the United States were found to own copies of Rage, kept in their bedrooms or school lockers. Others openly cited the story as an influence.

After a 1997 shooting in Kentucky, where a student named Michael Carneal killed three classmates during a morning prayer group, reports uncovered that he had, like others, a copy of Rage stored in his locker.

In a 1999 library conference in Vermont, King said: "I can't say for sure that Michael Carneal had read my novel Rage, but news stories following the incident reported that a copy of it had been found in his locker. It seems likely to me that he did.

"Rage had been mentioned in at least one other school shooting... The Carneal incident was enough for me. I asked my publisher to take the damned thing out of print. They concurred."

By then, at least three other hostage situations - in California, Kentucky and South Dakota - related to teenagers who held classrooms at gunpoint had associations with Rage, with many of the shooters reportedly re-reading the story repeatedly.

The novel's main character, troubled teenager Charlie Decker, had likely resonated deeply with some of the perpetrators.

Faced with the aftermath of one of his earliest works, King then had to reflect on whether the piece of fiction was at least partially responsible for the incidents.

"Do I think that Rage may have provoked Carneal, or any other badly adjusted young person, to resort to the gun? It's an important question... The answer is troubling, but it needs to be faced: in some cases, yes. Probably it does."

He went on to say how difficult it was to face that a piece of art can become "an accelerant on a troubled mind."

"One cannot divorce the presence of my book in that kid's locker from what he did," he said, even drawing comparisons with how serial killer Ted Bundy fuelled his violent fantasies by consuming graphic material.

"To argue free speech in the face of such an obvious linkage... seems to me immoral," he said.

He added: "That such stories will exist no matter what - that they will be obtainable under the counter if not over it - begs the question. The point is that I don't want to be part of it."

"Once I knew what had happened," he explained, "I pulled the ejection-seat lever on that particular piece of work. I withdrew Rage, and I did it with relief rather than regret."