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The Long Walk |
you don't understand ... once you're dead, that's it
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The Long Walk |
Set in an undetermined future that strangely mirrors our own present, The Long Walk is an excersize in exhaustive horror. The dystopic plot is simple enough: one hundred young boys compete in a marathon, The Long Walk. They are monitered by a military halftrack and a larger-than-life, enigmatic father-figure known only as The Major. The goal is to walk, and walk, and walk. The rules: you cannot walk slower than three miles an hour, you cannot interfere with the other Walkers, and you cannot stop. If any of these rules are broken, you get a warning. A Walker can get three Warnings. Then, they are shot. The winner is the one left alive.
What motivates the boys is something as strangely vague as The Major, simply known as The Prize. Supposedly, The Prize consists of everything you could ever want for the rest of your life. But the phrasing of that, and the idea of the Prize itself, loom like mocking angels above the Walkers before much time goes by.
The main character is a boy named Ray Garraty. We are with him from the beginning, and since we are only in his head, we can fairly guess the outcome. But the ending isn't the shocking part. It's the road there.
Garraty makes tentative friends with his fellow Walkers. Art Baker, Pete McVries, and a puzzling young man named Stebbins round out the supporting cast. The boys start out optimistic ... until the first Walker is shot. The harsh reality of the Walk comes down on them then, yet they plunge ahead, grimly determined to not let it beat them down.
But it does. Along the way, Garraty and the others undergo a transformation. They chat casually about necrophelia and enemas. They reveal horrible secrets (especially Stebbins). They suffer, both mentally and physically (an especially tense scene involves Garraty's struggle with a leg cramp). They question the validity of The Prize and their views on The Major shift dramatically. Toward the end, their tenebrous grasp on reality falters, and the last few chapters read almost hallucigenically. And they die. One by one, they die.
As stated before, the outcome of the Walk is no real surprise. But when the second-to-last Walker is shot down and Garraty is informed that he has won, he finds he cannot stop walking. He sees a "dark figure, up ahead, beckoning." And, in his crazed, exhausted state, Garraty finds the strength to run.
A harrowing, deeply disturbing novel of loss and ultimate authority, The Long Walk is probably the most upsetting of the Richard Bachman novels. It follows the basic structure of the other Bachmans. The Walkers, (like Charlie Decker of Rage, Barton Dawes of Roadwork, Ben Richards of The Running Man, Billy Halleck of Thinner, and the residents of Poplar Street in The Regulators) have been cut off from society by some outside Authority figure. Time is measured in death, and, like the other major Bachman characters, hope is something left at the starting gate. Depressing yet beguiling, upsetting yet enthralling, The Long Walk is truly a dark and memorable experience.
I first read The Long Walk when I was fifteen, old enough to be a Long Walker. It freaked me out then. I reread it last year, after I had turned twenty-one. It still freaked me out. The basic idea -- kids walk or they die -- is enough to give me goosebumps, but the way Garraty and the others continue, keep walking, after all endurance and sanity are left, is just overwhelmingly disturbing. My above critique and this observation don't come close to exacting the tone of this novel, which is a quivery sort of cold darkness. A highly reccomended read, if only for its supreme effectiveness. Let me put it this way: The Long Walk has given me more nightmares than any of the other Stephen King books combined.
It's kind of strange that this one didn't send fireworks off about Stephen King's authorship. Lots of little in-jokes abound here, especially the fact that The Long Walk itself starts in Maine, and that Garraty's number is 47 (King's birth year.) It's the gift of 20/20 hindsight -- you can spot it now, but would you then?
The Long Walk was originally released in a paperback form under the name Richard Bachman. Like Rage, Roadwork, and The Running Man, this one was made to forage on its own under a Stephen King pseudonym in a cheap, throwaway paperback form. But something happened with this one that didn't happen with the other early Bachmans: It got reprinted. Why? It gained a small cult following, and was still popular enough in 1985 to still be in print when the Thinner was released and Bachman's cover was blown. Perhaps, even without the revalation, it would still be gaining popularity.
In its first edition, The Long Walk is as hard to come by as the other early Bachmans. It now commands about $75-$150 on the secondhand market. If you don't want to pay big bucks, pick up the omnibus The Bachman Books. The story remains the same.