Direct and relentless, like the best of Poe’s work.

Edgar Allan Poe’s work was characterized by one simple concept and a brutal and undeviating delivery. The “Cask of Amontillado” was an inevitable march to the bricking up of the victim. “The Tell-Tale Heart” was unescapable towards its conclusion. Foreshadowing and an inexorable conclusion marked the horrific legend of the “Fall of the House of Usher”.

Like Poe, King took a devilishly simple idea and delivered one of his strongest works, but lean and muscular in its vibrancy.

The Long Walk was one of King’s earliest writings, put together long before its 1979 publication. The word on the Bachman pseudonym was that early publishers did not want him putting out too many at a time so he created the alter ego to be able to sell more books. Interestingly, King noted that the books he had slated for publication under the Bachman name took a different, darker tone. Such a statement from Stephen King is marked with ominous forebodings.

Set in an alternate history, near future dystopian society ruled by an autocratic leader called “The Major”, 100 contestants, all young men, begin a walk in Maine. The rules are simple: walk and maintain a pace or the walker is given a warning. Thirty seconds later, he is given a second warning. Thirty seconds later he is given a third warning. If he has not returned to his pace after this last warning – he is shot. They keep walking until only one is left.

The Hunger Games was published in 2008. This idea of young people being ritualistically killed in a game like setting has been a popular concept for some time and in many genres. In an oblique way, readers could also compare this to William Goldings’ masterful 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. King is on to a primal notion. Young people dying for an obscure and artificial context could be a metaphor for war, or for any obsequious and unquestioning submission to government power.

King also creates a nebulous and faceless character of The Crowd. Lining the road throughout the miles and days of the walk are hundreds, thousands, of well-wishers and fans. King depicts a culture where the Long Walk is the national pass time, where contestants are cheered and honored, like gladiators in Rome. This faceless personification is reminiscent of David Lean’s excellent portrayal of the same phenomena in his 1948 film Oliver Twist.

Most of the dialogue in the novel is made between the walkers. As they walk, and die, and grow fatigued, and die, and continue walking, their conversations reveal a microcosm of life and of philosophy and of what is important to each of them in this final journey for all but one.

Shocking in its ruthless exactitude, provocative in its composition, this very early work displays King’s vast talent.

This book and I had a bit of a rocky start, but it REALLY grew on me as I got to know the characters more and more. It's so impressive how much Stephen King was able to do with this really simple concept!

Popsugar Challenge 2020 - A Book with a great first line

And that line is 'A old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning looking like a small tired dog after a hard run'.

This is probably the most exhusting book I've ever read. Stephen King in his usual way pulls you into the plot and all I will say is put some comfortable shoes on, as the title suggests you're in for a long walk and it's going to hurt and you absolutely will lose your mind.

Really enjoyed this and its short for a SK at around 400 pages.

4 stars.

“They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?”

“They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.”

How much do I love this book? There are too many ways to count actually, which is why no matter how many re-reads I've done of it (and there have been many over the years), The Long Walk has always left me too intimidated to review it. I managed a brief blurb of something when I listened to the audiobook a few years back, but never a "real review". So heaven help me, here's my real review.

According to King, he wrote The Long Walk while in college in 1966-67 and it became one of those "drawer novels" that got put away to gather dust when he couldn't get it published. King wasn't a household name yet of course. First, he had to publish Carrie in 1974. Then Salem's Lot in 1975. Followed by The Shining in 1976. In three short years King became a household name. So much so that he got the idea to become Richard Bachman.

King decided he would use this pseudonym to resurrect a few of those dusty "drawer novels" and rescue them from obscurity. He believed they were good (for me, two of them are better than good, they are outstanding -- The Long Walk and The Running Man -- according to King written in a 72 hour fugue in 1971). But King wanted to know readers thought the books were good because they were good, not just because his name was on the front cover in giant letters. His publisher at the time also didn't want to flood the market with more King books when he was already churning them out one a year.* Hence, Bachman was born.

*(these were the days before James Patterson decided it was okay to publish 20 books a year and only write one of them yourself).

The Long Walk is easily, hands-down my favorite Bachman book, but it also ranks as one of my favorite King books period. Top 5 without even blinking an eye. It's lean and mean, with a white hot intensity to it. What I love about The Long Walk is what I love about King's early short stories collected in Night Shift: There is a rawness in these stories that reflects the drive and hunger of a young man consumed with his craft. For me The Long Walk has always burned bright as if King wrote it in a fever. There's a purity in these pages, a naked desire to tell the tale that still gives me chills every single time I pick up the damn book and read that opening sentence: "An old blue Ford pulled into the guarded parking lot that morning, looking like a small, tired dog after a hard run."

Clumsy? Sure. A bit of an awkward simile? Absolutely. But what a hook. And the hook only digs itself in deeper as each page is turned. Until finishing becomes a matter of have to, any choice or free will stripped away. It's one of those books that grabs you by the short hairs and doesn't let go until it's finished with you.

Before the dystopian craze spawned by The Hunger Games trilogy, before the rise of reality TV with shows like Survivor, King imagined an alternate history American landscape where an annual walking competition would become the nation's obsession. One hundred boys between the ages 16-18 start out walking, and continue to walk at 4mph until there's only one remaining -- the winner. Boys falling below speed for any reason get a Warning. Three Warnings get you your Ticket, taking you out of the race. Permanently. It's walk or die. And as someone who's done her fair share of walking, the idea of that much walking without ever stopping makes my feet and back ache just thinking about it.

But King will make you do more than think about it, he will make you walk that road with those boys, to experience every twinge of discomfort, to feel the rising pain and suffocating fear, to suffer with the boys in sweat, and cold, and hunger, and confusion, as they walk towards Death and consider their own mortality. You will hear the sharp cracks of the carbine rifles and your heart will jump and skip beats.

One theme that King has revisited over the years is writing about the human body under brutalizing physical duress, at the body in extremis and what humans are hardwired to do to survive and go on living another day. Excruciating physical peril undeniably comes with a psychological component and no one writes that better than King. We see it in books like Misery, Gerald's Game and the short story "Survivor Type". King uncovers all the nitty-gritty minutia of human physical suffering and asks the question: How far is any one person willing to go to keep on taking his or her next breath? Stephen King knows pretty damn far. Just ask Paul Sheldon or Ray Garraty. Or the castaway in "Survivor Type" -- him most of all. King also knows that the human body has an amazing capacity for trauma. It can withstand a lot -- so much so that the mind often breaks first.

Each chapter heading of The Long Walk quotes a line from a game show host, but the one that really sticks out (and presumably gave King his idea in the first place) is this one by Chuck Barris, creator of the The Gong Show -- "The ultimate game show would be one where the losing contestant would be killed." And isn't that the truth? Certainly, the Romans knew this as they cheered for Gladiators to be mauled to death by wild animals (or other Gladiators). Just ask the French who cheered and jeered as thousands were led to their deaths by guillotine. There is an insatiable blood lust that lingers in humans that I don't think we'll ever shake completely, no matter how "civilized" we think we've become.

Violence as entertainment is part of the norm, so I have no problems believing that under the right (terrifying) conditions, death as entertainment could become just as normalized. Outwit, Oulast, Outplay on Survivor suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.

One of the things I've always loved about this book is how King handles the audience as spectators, complicit in this cold-blooded murder of its young boys. When the novel first starts, the spectators are individuals, with faces and genders and ages. As the story progresses, spectators increase in number to "the crowd", loud and cheering, holding signs. By the novel's climax, spectators filled with blood lust have morphed into a raging body of Crowd (with a capital C). It is an amorphous and frightening entity that moves and seethes with singular purpose obsessed with the spectacle, and baying for blood like a hound on the scent. It's chilling because there's such a ring of truth to all of it. Were it to ever happen, this is how it would happen. When King is writing at his best, the devil is always in the details.

Another aspect of the story that has always engaged me is the boys’ compulsion to join the Walk and be complicit in their own execution. I've always wanted to ask King if he meant this story to be an allegory for young boys signing up to die in Vietnam (considering he wrote it as Vietnam was heating up and on the nightly news). I think naivety and ignorance got a lot of the boys to The Walk, including Garraty. I think young people (especially young men) believe themselves to be invincible, that death is not something that can happen to them no matter the odds or circumstances. I'm sure no boy went to Vietnam thinking he would come home in a body bag, though many of them did.

If it's not obvious by now, I could talk about this book until the sun burns itself out, or the zombies rise up. And I haven't even touched upon its possible links to the Dark Tower! Which I will do now under a spoiler tag. If you haven't yet, read this book. If you have a reluctant teen reader in your life, give them this book. If it's been a long time since you've read this book, don't you think it's time to read it again?

The Long Walk and possible links to the DT Universe:
It's important to remember that TLW is a VERY early book for King, that pre-dates his beginning to write of a Dark Tower (which in the afterward to The Gunslinger he says was 1970). BUT (and this is a big but), I find it credible to believe that before King ever put pen to paper in regards to Roland and his quest, or to ever imagine a man in black, King had the seeds and themes of these ideas percolating in the back of his writer's brain already.

I didn't always think so until I read The Dark Man: An Illustrated Poem. King wrote this poem in college and it is in essence Randall Flagg's origin story. Which brings us to that dark shadowy figure that's beckoning to Garraty at the end of The Long Walk. It is very "dark man", "man in black", "Walkin' Dude" "Flagg-like". Whether it is or not, we'll never know. If he hasn't by now, I'm sure King has no plans to confirm or deny it.

Something else to consider Constant Readers:
TLW flirts with being an "alternate history" because of this passage:

The lights filled the sky with a bubblelike pastel glow that was frightening and apocalyptic, reminding Garraty of the pictures he had seen in the history books of the German air blitz of the American East Coast during the last days of World War II.

The date April 31st is also used. So here's a question -- is this alternate history or do you suppose King had already started experimenting with the idea of "other worlds than these"?

And one more passage that jumped out at me on this re-read that felt very Dark Tower-like:

Garraty had a vivid and scary image of the great god Crowd clawing its way out of the Augusta basin on scarlet spider-legs, and devouring them all alive.

The scarlet spider-legs reminded me of the Crimson King. Stretching, maybe. But it's fun to think about.

Es una maravilla. Lo mejor con el pseudónimo de Richard Bachman

A relentless, horrifying journey into the extremes of human physical and mental endurance, The Long Walk is a harrowing novel, not an outright horror tale, but a terrifying trip that gets under the readers skin as the walk wears on. Bachman (sai King) is able to get the reader to experience the walk in intimate detail; each aching arch, sleeplessness, the gut renching realization of the reality of the situation. As each mile passes, we become as much part of the long walk as the characters. Of the Bachman books, The Long Walk is the best written and most effective at looking at the more cynical and cruel aspects of the human mind and spirit.

I admit that I have about 10 books going right now. Hurricane Harvey has thrown me off my groove. I have attempted to start books and then set them down to deal with shitty reality for a while, and then not gotten back to them. But, I picked this one up and devoured it. It was so compelling to me.

Of course, I love dystopia. I want the future to be seriously fucked-up. I want people to be eating weird pellets that are probably made out of people, an evil overlord with some sort of hatred of children for some reason, flying cars and everything robotic - but evil robots - not good ones, an unfair class system that holds the plebs down, a scrappy resistance with a sexy (although dirty) leader, lots of senseless killing and violence, and of course - death games. This book was about the death games.


Okay, maybe some of those ideas aren't exactly fresh.

So, this is set in the 1970's maybe, but an alternate reality, I guess, because I don't remember there being a gameshow/competition where 100 teenage boys walked day and night until only one was left alive. I may have just been born, but I'm pretty sure I would have heard about it.

The deal is that they have to keep a continuous pace of 4mph. If they slow down or stop, they are given three warnings. If they still can't keep up, they are shot in the head. Now, I just want to say that someone would absolutely have to threaten to shoot me in the head before you get my ass out there doing a fast-walk for miles and miles. Ah, who am I kidding, I would be the first one shot. And, I wouldn't even mind. Beats walking like a chump.

So, all of these boys, who are definitely chumps, are walking day and night and getting all weird. Of course it messes with their minds a bit. They make little friendships, examine their life choices, and prepare to die. Seriously, how bad are your life choices when you sign up for this deal?? It's not like the Hunger Games where they have no choice. These chumps not only signed up for this shit, but they had to pass mental and physical tests to do it. Youth these days. So stupid. I mean those days. So stupid. One chump even tells his story about how he entered on a dare/whim/lark and it went too far. Dude!!!


Peer pressure. Not even once.

The rest of them are suicidal for some reason. Oh, maybe it's because they are teenagers living in an oppressive dystopian world. I mean, depressing teenagers is pretty damn easy on a good day.


Holy shit! Where can I purchase this horse? He's glorious!

The book is not filled with action and adventure, although there is killing. It is more of the inner struggle of the characters. I could talk about how it's possible to see some symbolism in the walk as being a journey in life with the general being an all-powerful being who is promising the person who makes it to the end the prize of anything their heart desires. It is also the ultimate in the carrot and stick analogy , but I'm not that deep. I just liked that a bunch of stupid chumps learned that you should never sign up for anything that has the promise of untold riches. It's always a sucker deal. Unlike what I've got going on. There is a Nigerian prince who wants me to distribute millions of dollars in any way I want, including keeping it for myself. All I need to do is send him my banking information and those millions are on their way.

Oh, and forget the horse. I want one of these guys. Look at those smiles! Only good things can come from me owning an alpaca in my suburban home. They swim, right?

I have to confess I thought this book was going to be extremely boring. I mean its a book about 100 boys walking until they die. It seemed like a rather boring plot.

Why Oh Why Did I doubt Stephen King?

The Long Walk is a riveting read. I felt the same exhaustion and fear that the boys in this story were feeling.

The Long Walk is in my opinion an allegory about war and how countries send young (mostly) men into dangerous spaces to fight and die. Effectively they are marching(walking) them into their deaths. And the vast majority of the time these "kids" die for nothing.

To some people it may seem like The Walk Long is pointless but then so are most wars.

No rec because this book isn't for everyone.

3 stars

n  

“Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once.”

n

This book will definitely age well for me. It will stay with me for a while and keep me up at night. The ending was fantastic... though most of it was just "good". Ray Garraty is to take part in an annual national event called the Long Walk, where 100 boys are chosen to participate in a walk where if they stop walking, they are shot. Only one boy survives. This book is a psychological-thriller filled with commentary on entertainment media, life, and desensitisation.

I'm not gonna lie, I am terrified. All the philosophical musings of the Walkers about life, death, love etc. has left me with a lot to think about. The strongest part of the novel is how the themes are conveyed. A lot of it is shown through the conversations that the Walkers have and these conversations are constantly being called back and reinterpreted, so you never stop thinking about them. The things discussed are also shown in the different ways that Garraty starts to perceive reality, his pain, and his motivations. I think that for these reasons, if I were an English teacher in High School, I'd give this as a mandatory read. The Long Walk is enjoyable, there is a lot to discuss, and it forces you to actually think and make your own opinion.

All that being said, there were moments that I struggled to keep going because it is a singular concept that we are going through. The concept is executed well, but it does get tiring after a while to hear about pain being described in a 100th different way. This "slog" mostly occured in the middle because I thought the ending was great and the beginning was really good.

As a person who is getting more and more acquainted with King's works, I think that this is a great starting spot for new fans. It shows King's scary side without the supernatural element. It shows us humans at our worst.



That ending has me speechless. I don't know how I want to interpret it. Does Garraty die? Was that dark figure the Grim Reaper? Was it one of the Walkers? Is he just blacking out? There are so many options and implications... I won't let this go any time soon.

There are questions that I have surrounding the actual world this is taking place in. Why aren't the people saying anything? How did America get to this place where the Major can go around killing kids and the soldiers don't care? On one hand, the fantasy lover side of me says that I want it all to be spelled out for me, but on the other, I see the genius in keeping this obscure. I think that this is the point; the reader should feel horrified and draw parallels to our world today. Yeah what can I say, the actual philosophy in this book was phenomenal.

Me gustó más la primera vez que lo leí, hace muchísimos años, sobre todo porque no vi lo machista que eran los personajes. Me ha fascinado y repugnado a partes iguales.

The Long Walk was a very long walk indeed and to see so many boys get shot was not my thing. Now why I decided on four stars. It's Stephen King and as we all know Mr. King knows how to write a book. Plus there were a couple of twists at the end I didn't except. Stebbins turns out to be the Major's son, and enters the Long Walk to try and connect with his long lost father, which doesn't happen, and after making a pact not to help each other at the end of the race the pact ends up falling apart at the very end which was a nice ending to the book.

I love reading about dystopian societies, but this book left me wanting. I was really unsure of whether I liked it enough to warrant giving it 3 stars or 4 stars, and I'm still not sure, so for the time being, it will be marked as 4, but in my mind its 3.5.

I really felt like the King (or Bachman, if you prefer) who wrote this story was just not the King that I know and love yet. One of the things that I love the most about King is that he creates a world that is tangible and real, and then people's it with characters that are real. This book was half there, but I didn't feel like it was done.

The world didn't feel 'complete' to me. I wanted to know more about how society got to the point of allowing 100 young men to essentially torture and sacrifice themselves every year. I wanted to know what the point was, aside from the prize, which to be honest, seemed too good to be true.

With the self-proclaimed expert regarding The Long Walk, Stebbins, offering up little tidbits here and there, I felt like King could have explained a bit more about the origins of The Long Walk, but maybe that's just a personal desire because I love knowing the origins of things.

I thought that the characters were pretty well developed, but I was disappointed that none of them know why they had signed up for The Long Walk. Maybe it was a teenage boy rebellion/pride/honor thing, I don't know. I would have liked to have an answer to that, at least in Garraty, since he's our man.

I did appreciate the parallels to life itself though. Sometimes, you just have to keep going, even if you don't know why you're doing it. That's what makes me undecided about the rating I should give this one. I also believe that there was a reference to the Crimson King in there, too- or maybe the spark of an idea of what the Crimson King would become? When Garraty is thinking about the Crowd, and how it "...claws its way out of the Augusta basin on scarlet spider-legs and devour[s:] them all alive..." it just reminded me of that.

Anyway, this was a bleak and unforgiving story, and I'm not sure I could recommend it exactly, but I did enjoy it, overall.