The Long Walk (1979)

I've run a marathon. It was five hours, and much of it was grueling. Arguably, walking 26.2 miles would actually be harder, because it means far more time on your feet than running. Walking more than a hundred miles nonstop is just plain inconceivable. Welcome to the world of The Long Walk.

After the clunker that was Rage it wasn't long before I was back to Bachman. Before going anywhere with this, I do want to point out that this was one of three Stephen King books I had read prior to last year, so, other than forgetting the finer plot points over time, nothing here shocked me. But the first time? Oh my....

To the best of my understanding, the original intent of the Bachman alias was to allow King to publish more than one novel a year, which was and still remains the industry standard. Initially it gave him the freedom to dust off and introduce some of his pre-Carrie work. This is the case with this book and Rage, as well as Blaze if you believe the back story behind it. Since you may know how much I despised Rage, I likely would have gone into this book with very low expectations had I not read it before.

Fear not, The Long Walk is no Rage and thank God for that. Where the previous book was blunt, this one was clever. In fact, this book was so clever that I awarded it a higher rating than anything I've read on this project. I think this partly has to do with the nature of the story being more science fiction and less horror. Don't get me wrong, the plot is absolutely horrifying and downright nihilistic, but there is a subtlety, found in the very gentle exposition that clicked very well with me.

What makes The Long Walk so great is that is makes the blunt rules of the event very clear, but the world in which such as event could happen stays vague. No reality show in our world would be so harsh as to kill the losers. It is a poorly kept secret that those unlucky folks that don't win The Amazing Race or Survivor don't actually go back to their vanilla lives, but instead are whisked off to some luxurious destination where they are sequestered in comfort for the rest of the show. This is why, except for acute embarrassment, those initial losers don't exactly seem crushed about their failure. They are probably wondering how many mai tais they can drink before blacking out while the host delivers the bad news to them. Our world is built on the mantra "it was a privilege just to make it here."

Something went seriously astray in the world of The Long Walk. It is made clear pretty quickly that the world in which is takes place is not our own. There is nothing complex about the Long Walk. One hundred teenage boys walk from the northern tip of Maine to the southern point at which only one is left standing. The only rules are that you cannot drop below four miles an hour. You get three warnings and the fourth comes in the form of a bullet, euphematically called a "ticket" much in the same way the soliders bought farms in Starship Troopers. Oh, and there is another rule: no quitting. You either win or get a ticket. The ticket comes with no warnings if you try anything goofy like attacking the soldiers watching your every move or slipping off into the crowd. Readers don't get any clear exposition about the state of the country or the world. This makes perfect sense, as teens are not likely to spontaneously discuss American history and political affairs in detail, even if they aren't walking for their lives. Little clues pop up along the way: April 31st, German bases in Chile, 51 states, and meat concentrates. Bigger clues are there for your consideration as well: The Major, a Khadafi-esque character who is clearly in charge in spite of his modest military rank, and a heightened sense of militarism throughout the book. Even the grand prize is fairly open-ended: anything you want. In the final pages you wonder how the survivor will be in any condition to even ask for anything other than a month-long nap in a hyperbaric goo-filled sleep pod to repair all the damage. The creepy thing about all of this is that in spite of the vagueness, for the most part the boys featured in the book have lead familiar-sounding lives. Most of the common social structures are the same in our world and that of the novel. People have families, jobs, and routines, but they all exist under a different political super-structure than ours.

We will revisit the Bachman books a few tomes down the road with Roadwork. I get the sense from various criticisms I've read, that The Long Walk may very well be as good as it gets for Richard Bachman. The next three were written while the secret of his identity was safe, while the later ones used the name out of convenience. By the early 1980's, as we shall see, Stephen King was able to generate enough heat under his own name to publish about as frequently and diversely as he wished.