The Long Walk
by Stephen King
Buy on AmazonThe Long Walk is a dystopian horror novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1979, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books, and has seen several reprints since, as both paperback and hardback. Set in a future dystopian America, ruled by a totalitarian and militaristic dictator, the plot revolves around the contestants of a grueling, annual walking contest. In 2000, the American Library Association listed The Long Walk as one of the 100 best books for teenage readers published between 1966 and 2000. ---------- Also contained in: - The Bachman Books - The Bachman Books
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"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."
The Best Stephen King Books · fivebooks.com