Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9156 in Books
• Published on: 2001-12-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

Customer Reviews

The Long Walk - The Ultimate Reality Gameshow
Originally published as one of the "Bachman Books" The long walk centres around a young man named Ray Garraty who decides to enter a competition called the Long Walk, whereby one hundred competitors literarally walk until they drop, with anyone who drops below four miles per hour being brutally dispatched by a group of heartless soldiers until only one is left. Why compete? Because of the ultimate prize - anything he desires. The book charts his mental decline as he walks hundreds of miles, gradually becoming attatched to some of his fellow walkers, all the while knowing that if he lives, they cannot. Similar in theme to "the Running Man", another book originally released in this compendium, this is King (or Bachman) at his best, with the tale mixing "Stand By Me" style themes of friendship amongst adversity with scenes of total horror. The only question is: how did King think he would continue to write under a psuedonym when these tales of the macabre could so clearly only ever have came from one man?

A haunting tale of lost innocence... King at his best
Before Bachman's untimely death of "cancer of the seudonym", Stephen King wrote some of his most original work. "The Long Walk" is an example. It is like the spitting image of "The Body", since both deal with the same subject: the loss of innoncence. But where "The Body" is an elegy to long gone friends, "The Long Walk" is an scary tale of the erosion of childhood dreams.

The premise is simple: 100 teenagers will walk, non-stop, until they drop one by one and are terminated, and the last one standing will be granted whatever his heart fancies. Around it King spools a gothic yarn of classic treatment. The kids that take the Walk go in expecting to fight only physical exhaustion. Slowly, they find out their enemy is a different one: MADNESS.

Anybody wishing to take a walk on the dark side, come along. They are about to start...

King at his best
What a story!!For such a simple plot,King builds up characters you can really identify with and feel for.The reader can feel the fear and pain along with his or her favourite character.With the advent of reality T.V.,one feels this tale is not set in too distant a future,and that scares me as much as the guards in the book,and the punishments for walking slower than 3 miles per hour.The cameraderie built up between the walkers is admirable,and displays King,s faith in the human creature.There are similarities between this and Mr.King,s "Running Man" but I do not see this as a fault,just a need to re-tell a fantastic story.This does not have the speedy action of "Running Man" or the out and out horror of "Carrie",but I found it really creepy in a disturbing my sense of right and wrong way.One feels for the "heroes"of the walk,but surely greed was their motivation to start the walk,so one cannot help but think "well you asked for it".A great read