Despite many decades of reading under my belt, this is my first ever Stephen King book. I actually picked this up something like 15 years ago and was having a ball reading it but some big distraction came along in life (I forget what) and interrupted my reading of the book to the point where I never picked it back up again.
In recent weeks I have felt the need to correct the gaping Stephen King-shaped hole in my reading history and so decided to right two wrongs by taking another shot at the Long Walk. TLDR: I’m glad I did.
The Long Walk has one of my absolute favourite tropes: the dystopian game show. In this particular case, the premise of the show is simple: 100 young men walking. Last guy remaining at the end gets the greatest desire granted.
Simple, right? Doesn’t sound dystopian at all. Just a bunch of dudes going for a walk.
Well…here’s the thing.
There are no rest stops, no toilet breaks, no support beyond basic sustenance & water. You must maintain a minimum speed of 4 mph. If you drop below 4 mph you get a warning. Walk for an hour without getting another warning and the warning gets removed. Accumulate 3 warnings and if you drop below 4 mph again you get given your ticket and you are eliminated.
And by eliminated I mean one of the soldiers in the half track that is constantly crawling along beside you shoots you in the head.
Yeah, pretty messed up.
But the real beauty of The Long Walk, for me, isn’t actually the Walk itself. It’s the relationships that develop between these 100 complete strangers as the miles pile up and the numbers slowly dwindle.
Rivalries are formed, grudges are held, alliances are made and, sometimes, broken. Friendships develop between people who have absolutely no reason to trust each other, despite every single one of them knowing that, ultimately, the only way they can survive is for everyone else to die.
And that’s where I think the book really gets interesting. King spends a lot of time exploring how these boys deal with the reality of what they’ve signed up for, both mentally and physically. Some seem to cope by joking about it. Some become increasingly withdrawn. Some cling to friendships. Others become competitive, angry or downright unpleasant. And as the Walk goes on and the physical exhaustion becomes increasingly brutal, those different ways of coping start to crack.
You get to know these characters not because King stops the story to give you their life histories, but because you watch how they behave when they’re exhausted, frightened, in pain and surrounded by people who, ultimately, they know they have to outlast.
And somehow, despite the fact that every one of them is ultimately competing to be the last man standing, a genuine sense of camaraderie develops between them.
I went into this expecting the central question to be “how long could someone physically keep this up?” By the end, I found myself much more interested in “how would I behave if I knew everyone around me was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it?” That’s a much darker question, and I think it’s what gives the book its staying power.
I do have one peeve with this book though, that being the superhuman feats of physical endurance these young men achieve. I’m a long distance hiker, I walk hundreds of miles over difficult terrain for days, even weeks on end and I do this for fun. Some of these boys however are walking hundreds of miles, with no rest, no real sleep, barely any food and they are doing all this constantly at a minimum of 4 mph.
You go and walk 4 mph for as long as you can without stopping or slowing, see how long you can do it for. I bet its not hundreds of miles 24 hours a day!
Obviously, this is a dystopian novel rather than a documentary about human endurance, so I’m willing to suspend disbelief. But as someone who spends an unreasonable amount of time walking long distances, it did occasionally pull me out of the story.
Overall though, the realism gap there did not spoil the book for me. I really enjoyed The Long Walk and I am glad that I chose to revisit it and give it the full read it deserves.
It has also achieved its secondary goal of “getting me into Stephen King”. It was accessible, the pages just flew by, and most importantly it left me wanting to see what else King can do. For a book I started 15 years ago and abandoned, that’s a pretty decent second chance.