‘We’ll scrape our shoe on the stars and hang upside down from the moon…’
When I was 18 years old, I could barely make a sandwich. When Stephen King was 18 years old, he started writing The Long Walk – his first novel. He finished it a year at the ripe old age of 19, and it was eventually published 12 years later under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It’s a masterpiece…
In a dystopian near-future version of America, a group of 100 boys are chosen to compete in the titular Long Walk – an annual contest that can be neatly summed up in four words: work or you die. The last man standing wins a hazily defined prize. Our main character is Ray Garraty – a 16-year-old kid who doesn’t really know why he signed up. McVries, his closest ally, also doesn’t really know why he’s there either. Neither does Stebbins with his cryptic philosophical musings, nor Barkovitch, nor Olson. None of them really has a damn clue why they entered the contest. But still, they walk. They walk until their shoes evaporate and their skin hangs off them and they are nothing but walking (always walking) skeletons.
While I read much of King’s most celebrated works as a teenager, I came to The Long Walk relatively late. It was in the early stages of torrenting and I had downloaded a huge file that contained everything King has ever published. I read the whole thing on my laptop screen, something that I have never done before or since. It was love at first sight. And then, I never read it again (until now). This was mainly because its status grew in my head over the years to near mythical proportions and I was sure there was no way that the book itself would live up to what I had constructed in my head. Reading it again all these years later, I needn’t have worried. It’s still as vibrant and incendiary and heartbreaking as it was when I left it.
King has long been the master of the coming-of-age tale, and The Long Walk (along with IT and The Body) is his finest example of this. Despite the huge cast of characters, they are all so lovingly drawn, so distinct, that they are immediately brought to life. Written as a reaction to the Vietnam War and inspired by Shirley Jackson’s classic short story The Lottery, The Long Walk is both incredibly bleak (the ending is genuinely horrific), but also strangely uplifting. By the end of the book, even though it’s only 380 or so pages, I felt like I had been on an epic journey with these boys. King’s prose is so rich, his description of pain and mental torment so vivid, that I could imagine myself marching alongside them, careful not to drop below 4mph to avoid getting my ticket (the term they use instead of being shot to death by aloof and disinterested soldiers to try and life the gloom).
The Long Walk is not just the best of the Bachman Books (it is that), but it’s also one of King’s finest works, and one of the best combinations of the Bildungsroman and science fiction ever written. Yes, Francis Lawrence’s film adaptation is fantastic, but you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t also dive into the book. It’s a tough journey but boy is it worth it.