Rating: 
Summary: Wonerful...just wonderful
Review: This was the first book I read by Steven King (or Richard Bachman), and I was not disappointed. This story catches you right at the beginning, and until the end, you can't set the book down. I still don't know how anyone could ever even think up such an ending, by appairently they can. If you want to read a good book by Steven King, pick this up, in fact, pick it up no matter what.
Rating: 
Summary: GREAT, BUT . . .
Review: Well the story it self was great, fast, and enjoyable. Overall the book is well worth the ten bucks it costs, and more. HOWEVER, if you have not read this book yet, do not read the forward until you have. The foreward gives away the ending, and the ending is amazing IF you haven't read the foreward. So, ya, read the book, but read the foreward as if it were an afterward.OVERALL: Great read!!!
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Summary: Another excellent King book . . .
Review: The Running Man is the story of Ben Richards and his risk to make money for his desperately poor family. It is the year 2025 and there are the very rich and the impoverished. Free-Vee is a television that is installed in every person's house that shows game shows where people are used for entertainment so they can make money-- even if it costs them their lives. Richards decides that he has no other choice other than to be on one of the game shows to win money. The book talks about what he has to go through in order to be chosen to be on a show. Finally, he is chosen for the show "The Running Man" where he is sent out into the streets and then proceeds to run from hunters who are trying to find him and kill him. The book talks about his near escapes and his encounters while running across the country from the hunters as well as everyone in the country. The book is excellent from beginning to end and is hard to put down. The chapters are short which makes the book goes extrememely fast. The ending is one of the best endings to a book I've read in awhile. A must read!!
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing...
Review: At the same time, I found this both to be one of the most enjoyable, and one of the most disturbing, of Stephen King's books. It is definitely Richard Bachman style over King's usual subtle psychological horror. The book is also much better than the movie. The events take place in the future, when the television networks have more or less taken over political power. The economic distinction between classes is much more stark, and the only opportunity for the poor to rise through the socio-economic ranks is to volunteer for life-threatening game shows. The protagonist, a married victim of the old economy who is unable to find suitable employment, is unable to pay for basic medication that would save his infant daughter's life. And so the financial allure of the games tempt him. The story is well-told, but brutal in its telling.
Rating:
Summary: And now for something completely different...
Review: King wrote many unpublished works before hitting the big time. Later, when the publishing house was scrabbling madly through his attic, searching for anything to publish, they came across a load of early stuff which they published under the pen name of Richard Bachman. When this didn't work, they re-titled stuff as 'Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman'. This seemed to work better ... shows what a name can do! Running Man, though well written by anybody else's standards, is certainly not up to the usual King benchmark. It lacks the depth of the later King books. Having said all that, the story is entertaining and the characterization of Ben Richards, the protagonist is exceptional. In short, Richards is in a life or death race. He wins - he escapes poverty. He loses - he dies. Trouble is, no one has ever won. The game is televised and (fairly obviously) biased against the contestant. In later years, King claims that there was no ulterior message in Running Man, though to me it seems that he highlights the problems of a generation who are glued to the television screens, how gullible they are to anything they see on the silver screen, and just how far the major networks will go to retain 'customer loyalty'. Also, as I write this, just after the awful attacks on WTC and the Pentagon, it strikes me that it was not only Tom Clancy who foresaw the threat of an aeroplane attack on a building. Running Man is not a long book. It's an easy weekend read that will leave you amused but maybe a little sad about the future.
Rating:
Summary: Before Survivor and the WTC attack
Review: The Running Man is a fascinating account of a future America in which game shows are reality and people who hate the government attack 100 story buildings with jumbo jets.
I've just read the book for the 4th time and this has been the most depressing read of them all. All along I felt the end of the book was justifiable, but events of recent weeks have made me rethink.
Of course, it's easy to see why it seems justifiable in the book. The government is a giant TV network and they require everyone to own a television so that they can watch undesirables be dispatched at an alarming rate on the many game shows that run all day. The poor are treated as villains and there is no regard for basic human rights. It's Jesse Helms' dream of America.
Ben Richards enters the top show, The Running Man, to try to win enough money to get his daughter a doctor and cure her pneumonia. As he runs, he realizes that far more is at stake than his daughter's well being and he becomes a crusader for the downtrodden.
Of course, the network distorts his messages and vilifies him. But clearly the tide is turning as people actually find themselves rooting for him to win against incredible odds.
His final act is heroic and liberating. You see that the world will forever be changed and that it will be for the better. But now you have to stop and think that the terrorists on September 11th were thinking the same exact thing. Clearly violence is never the best solution, but to some it seems like the only way to deliver their message. Over the 15 or so years since I first read the Bachman Books I've seen many things in our society that make me refer back to two of them. Rage involves a student who goes on a shooting rampage. It's now become an all to common occurrence. When Survivor premiered I thought, "Here we go, Stephen King was hitting the nail right on the head."
After the World Trade Center attack, everyone was saying, "I never thought somebody would actually crash a jet into a building." I did. I don't know how many times I sat in a stadium, or looked at a high rise, and thought how easy it would be. Stephen King put it into words that made it seem all too plausible.
King wasn't the first to come up with something like that. Years earlier, in Black Sunday, Thomas Harris described crashing a blimp into a stadium. After the WTC attacks people started thinking about that and worrying that blimps shouldn't fly over sporting events. Maybe they should have been thinking about these things all along. After all, clearly some people were.
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Summary: The idea for the palestinian bombing of the twin towers
Review: This is where they got the idea, I bet.
Rating: 
Summary: And a car goes into the crowd!
Review: To this point in the Bachman Books (where I originally read the story), King had been steadily improving as his alter ego. This was definitely a step back. King himself said that he thought that this was probably the strongest piece from the collection, since it didn't bother itself with a message (an outright lie, since there are obvious criticisms of America's voyeuristic society contained within the piece), a statement which really puzzles me. The story here isn't told exceptionally well--I don't see it as being up to King's usual standards. The chaptering is actually a little hokey, and has almost nothing to do with the actual plot of the book (a minor problem, but something which bothered me to no small extent). The story itself is uniformly depressing--there is no catharsis in this work. Just like at some points in the Talisman, the bad just builds and builds until everything comes to a bad conclusion. All things considered, this isn't a really reprehensible work, but it disappointed me, after seeing just what King is capable of. This is a story that most authors probably wouldn't have written, for that matter--it would seem to conform better to the dimensions of a short story. As a read for a short airline flight, it fits the bill, but if you're looking for meat, it's just not there to be had.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding science fiction
Review: The book is based on the extreme hypothesis that America could become a fascistic country, with three zones and social groups : the rich and happy business downtown area, the poor, famished and under- or unemployed working class derelict area, and the camps for the opponents who are authorized to survive and not be executed. Television is the absolute tool to dominate and control the people by providing them with old circus games like in Roman times. The main game is The Running Man, where a man is supposed to resist some super-duper-monstrous state-fighters who use all kinds of technology against empty-handed men. The book releases the designated fighters (ex-convincts who dream of a chance) directly in the second zone of society where they have to survive. The whole game changes when the cop who refused to kill innocent people in Bakersville is brought into the picture. He will manage to help the resistance, so that the truth will be broadcast on television, and he will capture a plane and destroy the whole television building, including the main master of ceremonies. But there is no hope, because the « hero » dies in his plane that crashes against the building, and the resistance does not stand one chance against the police and the army of the state. This book is signed Richard Bachman, and it is absolute pessimistic science-fiction. There is no future, there is no hope, there is no anything you want. We are living in a bleak dead alley that has no way out. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.
Rating:
Summary: More and more prescient
Review: When I read this story several years ago, I found it to be a good read. Not the best, certainly, but it was a great way to spend my afternoon. I had just discovered King's Bachman books, and I was amazed to see that the movie "The Running Man" was actually based on one of those stories. I had enjoyed the movie (hey, I was a teen in the eighties, and Arnold movies were my life's blood), so I was hopeful that the book would be as good. Well, the movie and the story are worlds apart, but luckily the book far surpassed the movie in every way (don't they always?). But now, looking back on the game show crazy that has developed over the past few years, and how crazy they have gotten (namely, shows like Survivor and Boot Camp come to mind), the story now seems eerily prescient. Could we be headed toward a Running Man type game show, where death is a possibility? Three years ago I would have said no. Now? Now it doesn't seem so fantastic anymore. Anyway, read this story. It might just tell the future...
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