The Long Walk

[cornerofmadness]

The Long Walk by Richard Bachman

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Yep this was a long walk, an absolute slog. If Wiki is to be believed, this was one of the first novels Stephen King ever wrote but was published several years later when he was doing his Bachman experiment. And it shows that this was an early book. It's the predecessor to things like The Hunger Games and as equally dull.

Just assume this whole review has spoilers as there isn't any way to review what bothered me without it.

My biggest problem with this is you're a hundred pages in and have NO IDEA why anyone would come up with this method of culling excess teenaged boys. Is war no longer a thing? As callous as it sounds, the only reason I can see for the Long Walk becoming a thing in this universe is to get rid of people we have no food/water for. At least Hunger Games tries to justify its murdering children for fun. And it's obvious the boys know the score. They know 'getting a ticket' doesn't just mean you're out of the game, you get shot in the damn head. They go into this knowing out of the 100 walkers 99 get a bullet and one gets everything he wants for life.

Is that motivation enough? Then why was the beginning so muted? I can't imagine driving my son to this, handing him off some cookies I baked for him and driving off like Ray Garraty's, our point of view character mother does. The premise is in the blurb. THey have to walk 4 miles an hour until they're dead.

The sad thing here for me is, that this probably would have worked better as a novella or short story but as an over 300 page novel it's just slow and I really didn't care if Ray was the last boy standing or not.



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