The Long Walk
by Stephen King

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• ISBN13: 9780451196712
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of The Long Walk

Book Review: Warning! No. 1, Stephen King! A 5-star warning!
Summary: 5 Stars

King would no doubt be amazed to hear that anyone regards "The Long Walk" as his "best" book; it's one of his earlier books, written in the "Carrie" era when John Travolta was king of pop, and it was originally a "Bachman" novel - that is, written when, for experimental purposes, King hid his light under the bushel of a less famous pseudonym.

Well, his later novels might have a more mature "style" and might flow easier, but the pace of this one is more tense and the characters are remarkably likable. And I'm amazed at how much confusion there is about what happens at the end. Reasonably intelligent people giving the ending an adequate amount of thought should have little trouble figuring it out.

Set in a futuristic era, ruled by a military dictatorship personified by "The Major", the story is about 100 boys of high-school age who set off on a "Long Walk" which requires them to maintain a pace of 4 miles an hour, come steep hills, hell, or high water. Anyone who has walked a treadmill knows that this is quite a brisk walking pace. The ostensible goal is "The Prize" - everything that you want for the rest of your life.

When a Walker drops below 4 miles an hour, he gets a warning. Three warnings are all that a Walker will get, though an hour without a warning enables the Walker to get rid of one warning. If a Walker slows down below 4 miles an hour while he's walking with three warnings, he's eliminated from the race. With extreme prejudice. By soldiers in a half-track armed with rifles. The winner is determined after 99 Walkers have been eliminated.

Although this is both an early novel and a Bachman experiment, it's still vintage King - a macabre walk of death taking place in a recognizable middle-class setting.

So King makes the occasion as festive as positive, adding his normal helping of cheerleaders, gym squads, Cub Scouts, Little League players, Italian fruit merchants, Grant Wood families, civic clubs, and automobile salesmen to the mix of spectators that cheer on the Long Walkers and roar at the crack of the rifles - as usual, this is King's way of accentuating the horror that he has created by "mainstreaming" it.

Still, speaking as one who utterly despises endurance athletes, I see tremendous possibilities in this idea. If one could find a way to eliminate the lion's share of many thousands of real-world smug cliquish androgynous leisure-class weekend warriors that clog up metropolitan areas with their self-loving marathon fests and who clog up their other environs during the remainder of the week, what a finer, happier world we would live in!

But the graphically-portrayed deaths of these boys aren't enjoyable at all. They are both pointless and heroically tragic. Even while making the Walkers very recognizably and coarsely adolescent, King is also able to make them quite endearing in their own way, much more endearing than the yuppie scum who participate in real-life marathons. As did other readers, I also enjoyed the camaraderie among the Walkers, made especially poignant by the knowledge that they had no hope of meeting again after the conclusion of the Walk.

King's "message" is somewhat garbled by the curious "game show" quotations that precede most chapters, but it becomes clearer when a later chapter instead begins with a radio announcer's call from the second Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston fight: "The blood has begun to flow...Clay is killing him...Clay is killing him...Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know how to describe this scene."

Clearly, King means for this novel to be a "statement" against the violence of sports culture. It's a typical left-wing bogeyman, as is the right-wing military dictatorship that organizes "The Long Walk" as both ritual and money-maker. In real life, the intellectualoids who govern us would never tolerate the rule of a military that they hadn't already taken over, as far back as the McNamara era.

And as athletes become wealthier and more yuppified, violence in professional sports has become less, not more prevalent, Mike Tyson notwithstanding. There is scarcely a millionaire sportsman today who would ever do anything as gauche as engage in open warfare for the good of the team.

And while King agonizes over the "culture of violence", in the real world, young boys are severely disciplined for even having violent fantasies, such as bringing cap pistols onto school grounds or pointing an index finger at a rival and yelling "bang".

Is the stench of violent death that pervades the world of "The Long Walk" any worse than the stench of antiseptic that pervades our own? And for all of the horror of the fictitious world that he created in "The Long Walk", is Stephen King aware of how relatively ATTRACTIVE it also is?

He's on the right track when he describes the Major's presence as "very masculine and overpowering". The world of the Long Walk is all that and it is also scrupulously fair - both in the un-coerced manner in which Walkers participate and in the way that the rules of the Walk are disclosed beforehand and enforced honestly during the Walk itself.

"The Long Walk" is an excellent story which attacks largely non-existent targets, a story about a world not as nightmarish as the author intended, but considerably more alluring.

In another setting, Stephen King himself has repeated the maxim that "it is the tale, not he who tells it." He doesn't know how right he is here.

I'm giving King 5 stars for this novel, but I'm also ordering him to re-read the 1948 Ray Bradbury short story, "Pillar of Fire", for a more accurate view of what the future looks like now.

Summary of The Long Walk

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