The Long Walk, book review. (Stephen King)

Another first time read for me of an old Stephen King/Richard Bachman book, and like The Running Man and Rage - which I reviewed last year - I really quite liked it.

It's a simple affair really, a hundred boys/young men have signed up for, The Long Walk, in the knowledge that they will die if they are not the last one standing. There is little premise here, but the assumption I made was that something bad had happened to the world, not Hunger Games bad, but something bad all the same; bad enough that hundreds of young men would essentially sign their own death warrant for a prize – that prize being: all and everything you could ever want or wish for.

I wasn't sure how a long walk could fill nearly three hundred pages but as is usual with King, you're halfway in before you know it and by the time you're close to finishing, you're so desperate to know who will win, that you just can't stop turning the page.

The walk begins at 9 am one unassuming morning and Garraty - our main character - and those that flank him, soon fall into an uneasy rhythm - drop below four miles per hour and you get a warning, get three warnings and the forth is a bullet in your skull, and yes, they really do kill you, so when your number's up or 'you get your ticket' as they say in the book, there's one less competitor to worry about.

There's not a lot of chit chat to start with but after a few hours, after fifty miles, after a kiss by the roadside that earns Garraty a warning, the strengths and weaknesses of Garraty and those around him start to show through, and it is here, in the characters, that the book really shines. You've got the boy with the limp who's going to be the first out but last longer than most, the loudmouth that goes surprisingly quiet as the days and miles tick by, the silent creepy boy who secretly scares them all, and due to their inadequacies, their jibes and mocking of each other, and in some cases their plain loathing, the book ebbs along like real life.

They talk about home, school, the ones they love, be it a girlfriend or a parent, and as they get ever fewer, as the miles trip past, the crowds grow and the sound of gunshots ricochet off the surrounding hills, they increasingly talk of the prize: Any and everything that they could hope or wish for, but will any of them be alive to claim it?

This is a three and a half star book for me. I thought I would like it but it ended up being better than I had anticipated.
So, one more King book down, several dozen still to go.

Rage, book review. (Richard Bachman aka Stephen King)

A lesser-known book from the master storyteller Stephen King is the focus of today's post but it's a good story all the same.

Rage is a book about a young man – Charlie – who has issues, but the issues he has are as much a mystery to him as they are to others. Sometimes he feels sad, sometimes angry, sometimes he just feels terribly confused and does stuff for reasons he cannot explain.
The majority of this book takes place in a classroom at Charlie’s high school, where he has shot dead a teacher locked the door and holds his fellow classmates hostage. Whilst we sit with him and his fellow pupils, we go back to when he was younger, when he smashed all the windows around his house, and we hear from some of the other kids too, about what it was like for them when shit happened, and in spite of the fact that this book was written in the seventies, it reminded me a bit, in its tone and subject matter (teen angst, mental health issues, etc) of a John Green novel. (Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska).
Charlie isn’t the only one with issues either. A popular girl who’s been going steady with a boy for a while admits that she's still a virgin, prompting Charlie to recants the story of when he nearly lost his virginity on a beach the year before but, in the end, wasn't up to the task. This in turn opens the door to other confessions, and before you know it, what you thought was a book about murder and insanity, becomes a book about life and how our perception of people, our prejudices, because of how a person looks, their gender, sexuality, colour or creed, is founded on the false persona that we show the world, when in reality we're completely different and screaming inside, and I liked it for that.
Rage is a short book, and combined with the excellent writing it won’t take you long to read, so grab a copy if you can (you may have to look under Richard Bachman, King’s pseudonym in the seventies and eighties to find it) but it seems that as time goes by, more and more of these older books are being re-released as King novels and based on this novella, the quicker that happens the better.
Three stars for this little gem then and on to The Running Man.