The Long Walk

"It has quite a simple concept. 100 boys—teenagers—start walking together. They have to walk at a set speed. If they go below that speed, they get a warning. After three warnings they are shot. The boy left at the end gets to pick basically whatever he wants as a prize. Can you write an interesting book about people just walking? Stephen King can. It’s all about the characters and their interactions with one another. There’s not much backstory, you don’t get to read about them growing up on farms and milking cows, anything like that. It’s just them, the walk, and the relationships they build with one another. So that really demonstrates his ability as a writer I think. I think it was his third or fourth. It was one of the books he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Yes, and for Stephen King, it is almost a short story, as it’s little more than 200 pages and his books are often much longer than that. For him, it’s a very short book."