The Long Walk

Rating:
Summary: Reading that sticks to your ribs ....
Review: Reading that sticks to your ribs (so-to-speak). This story will stay with you for years. I read 'The Long Walk' as one of the original short stories of the Bachman Books about 10 years ago. I still remember the details to this one story to this day. I have always considered this to be the best of the best of Steven's works. After reading 'On Writing', Mr. King agrees.

I lent my original copy to a nephew who never returned it. It took me 5 years to find the same [original] print.
I've since lent this book to two people whom I felt needed to read the story for different reasons:
* the first being one of those 'I can do anything' types. Loves a physical challenge, even at his age [45]. He needed a little reality check, and agrees he'll never forget this story and the emotions he felt while reading it.
* the second I accompanied on "A Walk to Remember", a 444 mile trek to NYC. Each day he walked 35 to 40 miles; each day he rested and slept. A grueling walk for him, blisters, shin splints, the threat of stress fractures, but never the possibility of not finishing the walk for reasons described in this story. Every day I reminded him that I had a book for him to read - 'The Long Walk'. After reading this book, he agrees this is not one he could have read during his rest periods of the trek.

I'm not one to recommend books or stories, but this is a reader's MUST. Just keep telling yourself -It's only a story. -It's only a story.

Rating:
Summary: Like reading a train wreck
Review: I occasionally describe a movie as "Like watching a trainwreck." You don't want to watch, but you can't quit. That's the way _The Long Walk_ works. It is excruciating. As usual Stephen King's dialog for boys is right on -- they are all teenagers, of varying sophistication -- all (but one) doomed to die -- and yet they walk on. We never know how the long walk got started, why it is tolerated, how there could be a civilization that would take 100 young men, carefully selected, and run them down into the ground, shooting each one mercilessly as they fail. Obviously, King was considering the Ultimate Game Show; miss a question and you die. The only real fascination in this book is wondering how he will kill off the odds-on favorites. They get colds, they go crazy, etc. etc. ad nauseum. I really wanted to put the book away (and did, to read some other book) but ultimately I had to finish it, just like I'd have to watch that train wreck until the last car stops.

So. You've been warned.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing, edge of your seat thriller.
Review: All i can say is WOW!. I was amazed at the detail in his writting. It was easy to get to liking the charecters and relating to the suffering they went through. I could visualize every moment. This was the first book by King i have ever read and if all are like this it certainly will not be the last.

Rating:
Summary: Best King book I have read....but....
Review: The best King book I have read. Actually it's the only good one I have read. As usual he ruins another book by a terrible ending. A great read though. Would have been a five star book except he quit when it came to the ending. Make up your own ending and enjoy this read. Another problem I have is, why couldn't we have some politicians on this walk...lol....

Rating:
Summary: First and Best
Review: This is the first Stephen King book I have ever read. I have always been leary of reading anything by him because I had heard that he was very descriptive and lengthy. From what I have read on these postings, I must have picked his best book yet to start with. I was very impressed with him and didn't find it ever to drag. The first night I had this book, I had sat down to just start it and had read through half the book before I noticed it.

I do have to say that the last few paragraphs kind of threw me for a loop at first. I did have to go back and reread it just to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

It did make me tired reading about all that these young boys endured throughout this long walk. I kept thinking how unfair things were for them. Anyway, I thought it was great, and I will read many more by him.

Rating:
Summary: The Long Walk -- Wonderful yet...
Review: It's been over a year since I read The Long Walk and it still makes me think. By reading the plot, you'd think it would get boring but King always seems to have something for us. It reads like a really long short story and I believe it is that that I love the most. Its story is simple yet holds so much meaning. Some have said that it deals with mordern day athletics. I saw it as a take on the military.

I was wanting to join the army before I read this. Though I still kind of want to, it made me think twice. The boys joined the walk for grandure and pride. Many young people join the military for the same reason. But, the truth is that in the long walk, you die. If you win you go crazy. Sounds a lot like going to War. What starts with pride and honor ends in blood and regret.

The whole book was good. The end left me dissapointed a little. I believe I understood it when I read it but didn't really want to think that was it. Over time I realized I was right. There could only be one end to that story, its not one we want to see but somewhere you knew it was coming. Just like those boys. Anyway, the rest of the book was so great and well written that it is still my favorite King. I think it is better than The Shining. Well maybe not better. The Shining has so much more to it, but The Long Walk is still my very favorite. Its the kind of book I'll probably read over and over and then give it to my future son to read. I loved it, every page.

Rating:
Summary: Must Read
Review: I have read every Steven King book out there and by far this is the best book he has ever written. It captures your attention from the beginning and you are left spellbound as you continue on. I highly suggest to anyone who in anyway likes Steven King to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Warning! No. 1, Stephen King! A 5-star warning!
Review: I'm not a huge Stephen King fan, but some of his books and short stories are pretty good, and I truly loved this novel and regard it as his best.

King would no doubt be amazed to hear that anyone regards "The Long Walk" as his "best" book; it's one of his earlier books, written in the "Carrie" era when John Travolta was king of pop, and it was originally a "Bachman" novel - that is, written when, for experimental purposes, King hid his light under the bushel of a less famous pseudonym.

Well, his later novels might have a more mature "style" and might flow easier, but the pace of this one is more tense and the characters are remarkably likable. And I'm amazed at how much confusion there is about what happens at the end. Reasonably intelligent people giving the ending an adequate amount of thought should have little trouble figuring it out.

Set in a futuristic era, ruled by a military dictatorship personified by "The Major", the story is about 100 boys of high-school age who set off on a "Long Walk" which requires them to maintain a pace of 4 miles an hour, come steep hills, hell, or high water. Anyone who has walked a treadmill knows that this is quite a brisk walking pace. The ostensible goal is "The Prize" - everything that you want for the rest of your life.

When a Walker drops below 4 miles an hour, he gets a warning. Three warnings are all that a Walker will get, though an hour without a warning enables the Walker to get rid of one warning. If a Walker slows down below 4 miles an hour while he's walking with three warnings, he's eliminated from the race. With extreme prejudice. By soldiers in a half-track armed with rifles. The winner is determined after 99 Walkers have been eliminated.

Although this is both an early novel and a Bachman experiment, it's still vintage King - a macabre walk of death taking place in a recognizable middle-class setting.

So King makes the occasion as festive as positive, adding his normal helping of cheerleaders, gym squads, Cub Scouts, Little League players, Italian fruit merchants, Grant Wood families, civic clubs, and automobile salesmen to the mix of spectators that cheer on the Long Walkers and roar at the crack of the rifles - as usual, this is King's way of accentuating the horror that he has created by "mainstreaming" it.

Still, speaking as one who utterly despises endurance athletes, I see tremendous possibilities in this idea. If one could find a way to eliminate the lion's share of many thousands of real-world smug cliquish androgynous leisure-class weekend warriors that clog up metropolitan areas with their self-loving marathon fests and who clog up their other environs during the remainder of the week, what a finer, happier world we would live in!

But the graphically-portrayed deaths of these boys aren't enjoyable at all. They are both pointless and heroically tragic. Even while making the Walkers very recognizably and coarsely adolescent, King is also able to make them quite endearing in their own way, much more endearing than the yuppie scum who participate in real-life marathons. As did other readers, I also enjoyed the camaraderie among the Walkers, made especially poignant by the knowledge that they had no hope of meeting again after the conclusion of the Walk.

King's "message" is somewhat garbled by the curious "game show" quotations that precede most chapters, but it becomes clearer when a later chapter instead begins with a radio announcer's call from the second Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston fight: "The blood has begun to flow...Clay is killing him...Clay is killing him...Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know how to describe this scene."

Clearly, King means for this novel to be a "statement" against the violence of sports culture. It's a typical left-wing bogeyman, as is the right-wing military dictatorship that organizes "The Long Walk" as both ritual and money-maker. In real life, the intellectualoids who govern us would never tolerate the rule of a military that they hadn't already taken over, as far back as the McNamara era.

And as athletes become wealthier and more yuppified, violence in professional sports has become less, not more prevalent, Mike Tyson notwithstanding. There is scarcely a millionaire sportsman today who would ever do anything as gauche as engage in open warfare for the good of the team.

And while King agonizes over the "culture of violence", in the real world, young boys are severely disciplined for even having violent fantasies, such as bringing cap pistols onto school grounds or pointing an index finger at a rival and yelling "bang".

Is the stench of violent death that pervades the world of "The Long Walk" any worse than the stench of antiseptic that pervades our own? And for all of the horror of the fictitious world that he created in "The Long Walk", is Stephen King aware of how relatively ATTRACTIVE it also is?

He's on the right track when he describes the Major's presence as "very masculine and overpowering". The world of the Long Walk is all that and it is also scrupulously fair - both in the un-coerced manner in which Walkers participate and in the way that the rules of the Walk are disclosed beforehand and enforced honestly during the Walk itself.

"The Long Walk" is an excellent story which attacks largely non-existent targets, a story about a world not as nightmarish as the author intended, but considerably more alluring.

In another setting, Stephen King himself has repeated the maxim that "it is the tale, not he who tells it." He doesn't know how right he is here.

I'm giving King 5 stars for this novel, but I'm also ordering him to re-read the 1948 Ray Bradbury short story, "Pillar of Fire", for a more accurate view of what the future looks like now.

Rating:
Summary: The Walking Dead
Review: This is a great book. It was recommended to me by a customer who told me of all of King's books, this one stayed with him the most. I only finished it yesterday but I can see that he's probably right. I can't really be within a group of people without somehow thinking we're all like the boys in the Long Walk, trying to outdo everyone else as if our life depends on it. Yet, we're trapped with one another, and the only thing that buffers us from insanity is other people (Sartre said hell is other people, but is lonliness really all that much better?)

Well, not to get too philosophical or anything. It was a good, fast read. I was surprised most by the actual distance traveled in the Long Mile. I found myself wondering how they could still be on their feet, let alone walking at least 4 mph after hundreds of miles. And I was intrigued how desensitized the boys became to death, and how accepting they became of their own inevitable impending deaths. I can almost say some of them reached peace near the end. Perhaps that was the most disturbing part.

The ending was vague, as many have said. But I think King made his point. The winner wasn't really a winner after all.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is one of my favorite books ever written. even though the plot is pretty simple, Stephen King does not bore us during the three hundred or so mile walk that these boys are competing in. Plus, i like walking, so i understood what it was like to go on long walks.