Books: The Long Walk By Richard Bachman/Stephen King (1979)

“Against the wishes of his mother, sixteen-year-old Ray Garraty is about to compete in the annual grueling match of stamina and wits known as The Long Walk. One hundred boys must keep a steady pace of four miles per hour without ever stopping... with the winner being awarded "The Prize"—anything he wants for the rest of his life. But, as part of this national tournament that sweeps through a dystopian America year after year, there are some harsh rules that Garraty and ninety-nine others must adhere to in order to beat out the rest. There is no finish line—the winner is the last man standing. Contestants cannot receive any outside aid whatsoever. Slow down under the speed limit and you're given a warning. Three warnings and you're out of the game—permanently.”

Stephen King has written and talked at length about the books that make up the initial Richard Bachman titles (Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man). While 1984’s Thinner was published as a Bachman title, he was outed by then. Meanwhile, two other Bachman titles, The Regulators {a “mirror” novel to his 1996 King tale Desperation} and Blaze came much later (that 2007 novel started as a novella written in 1973, and was then updated and expanded for the millennium). Finally, at the time of the announcement in 1985 about Bachman, King was already working on Misery, which he had planned to release as a Bachman book.

Hindsight is always 20/20, as it’s clear The Long Walk carried a lot of Stephen King DNA, even if published under Richard Bachman. But it was 1979 and the horror novelist was in his early days so unless you were really a reader who paid attention, what transpires in this book would’ve never been thought of connecting to him. While not highly original (somewhat a cousin to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery), in many ways this Bachman/King novel is the modern progenitor of the “kids battle to the death game” genre that has taken over YA fiction for these last 20 years or so. Also, really, up until him, up until the 1970s, killing kids in novels was frowned upon. Here, King takes a bunch of youthful characters and puts them through an emotional and physical nightmare where the books simple premise comes into focus: Start walking, don’t stop. If you do, you get a warning. You only get three warnings before, well, as King puts it; you get your ticket punched.

It is a despairing, dark work, or as it’s been called, King’s “most pessimistic novel.” At times, it degenerates into people get killed in gruesome ways and I’m sort of no longer amused by this type of ultra-violence being sold as entertainment. Then there’s James Smythe of The Guardian, who felt the elements of the novel connected to the Vietnam conflict: “the televised draft, the horror of seeing new friends die, the seeming lack of reason for it occurring in the first place.” That theme sort of makes sense, because there is no real for all of this occurring, as Bachman/King does not explain a thing – the reader just assumes this is tale is set in an alternate universe.

With this novel – and another Bachman/King title, The Running Man, due out as films in 2025- I guess I would recommend them. Still, I’m unsure how a film version of this book will work. It’s overlong and much could be cut – but are they going to depict a 100 teen boys being killed?

But I’m not sure I’ll be standing in line at the theater to find out.

Books: Roadwork By Richard Bachman (1981)

“Barton Dawes’ unremarkable but comfortable existence suddenly takes a turn for the worst. Highway construction puts him out of work and simultaneously forces him out of his home. Dawes isn’t the sort of man who will take an insult of this magnitude lying down. His single-minded determination to fight the inevitable course of progress drives his wife and friends away while he tries to face down the uncaring bureaucracy that has destroyed his once comfortable life.”

Like a lot of Stephen King’s work, Roadwork (released under Richard Bachman name) takes another ordinary person and shows us how the universe can really screw up what you thought was a good life. And Dawes had a semi-charmed life until things happened. And while he was able to somewhat recover from his wife’s miscarriage, but the death of their second child from a brain tumor began his slow descent into madness. But that’s not really an apt description, though. In the introduction, King writes about Barton coping with the death of Charlie (an interesting flip on how a husband and wife cope with the loss) and uses the death of his own mother to some answers to the conundrum of human pain: "I think it was an effort to make some sense of my mother's painful death the year before – a lingering cancer had taken her off inch by painful inch. Following this death I was left both grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it all.”

Still, Barton seemed unsympathetic at the start, almost selfish, and, at times, a boorish loser. You get the sense, at first, this was a man who was finally pushed to his limit and decided to make those who (somehow) screwed up his life pay the price. But the book does surprise me because what does happen, at the end, is rather anticlimactic. While I think Roadwork (the third of five novels King released before being outed as Bachman), much like Thinner, could’ve been a short story or even a novella, it works better for me than Thinner. I don’t know, perhaps it’s my state of mind of late, my feelings of inadequacy and the sense that I have not lived a life of even semi-success. Dawes is a bit of a depressive, as I am. So in some ways, I felt for him. I understood him, somewhat.

I still three other “Bachman” books to read (and a few King books as well, as I’ve skipped and hopped over some is books over the decades (like The Tommyknockers). I will try and get through them over the coming months, but how much I plow through will always depend on factors.

Until next time…

Books: Thinner By Richard Bachman (1984)

“Billy Halleck, good husband, loving father, lives in Connecticut and practices law in New York City. He is both beneficiary and victim of the American Good Life: he has an expensive home, a nice family, and a rewarding job…but he is also fifty pounds overweight, and, as his doctor keeps reminding him, he is thirty-six years old-edging into heart attack country. Then Billy Halleck sideswipes an old Gypsy woman as she is crossing the street in their quiet little southern Connecticut town of Fairview, and everything in his pleasant, upwardly mobile life changes. He is exonerated in the local court by a friendly judge and sheriff…but a blacker, far worse judgment has been passed on him, nevertheless. Billy Halleck begins losing weight. He is pleased at first, then worried, and finally terrified. He can't stop it. He eats and eats but the weight flies off.”

After four books Stephen King had written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1982 (none of which I’ve yet read, but am working on changing that), this 1984 novel was the one that outed him (but it wasn’t him who did it, it was, of all people, a bookseller at a B. Dalton’s). As the story goes, “the general view among publishers was that an author was limited to one book per year, since publishing more would be unacceptable to the public. King therefore wanted to write under another name in order to increase his publication without over-saturating the market for the King ‘brand’. He convinced his publisher, Signet Books, to print these novels under a pen name. King has stated using the Bachman name was a purposeful “attempt to make sense out of his career and try to answer the question of whether his success was due to talent or luck. He says he deliberately released the Bachman novels with as little marketing presence as possible and did his best to ‘load the dice against’ Bachman.” King concluded he never found the answer to that particular question, whether it was talent or luck that made him successful.

“King dedicated Bachman's early books—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), and The Running Man (1982)—to people close to him. The link between King and his shadow writer was exposed in early 1985 after Stephen P. Brown, a bookstore clerk in Washington, D.C., noted similarities between the writing styles of King and Bachman. Brown was an avid King fan who had also read all of Bachman's books. After reading an advance reading copy of Thinner, which came to his store a few months before its publication, he was "eighty percent convinced" that Bachman was King; he noted that their style was only differentiated by the downbeat endings of Bachman's books, which runs counter to King's general philosophy of ending his books in an uplifting manner (with Pet Sematary and Cujo being exceptions). Brown located publisher's records at the Library of Congress which included a document naming King as the author of one of Bachman's novels. Brown wrote to King's publishers with a copy of the documents he had uncovered, and asked them what to do. Two weeks later, King telephoned Brown personally and suggested he write an article about how he discovered the truth, allowing himself to be interviewed. At the time of the announcement in 1985, King was working on Misery, which he had planned to release as a Bachman book.”  

For the book itself, I can see why Brown felt this book was written by King. There are a lot similar styles to writing, including a few catch phrases King has used for decades. As an example, released just before King’s epic novel IT, there is a line about and evil clown with a balloon. Then there is part where Billy and his Dr. Houston are talking about his weight loss, and Houston says, “You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there.” And then Billy adds, while talking about two other people who’ve been cursed, “..it starts to sound a little like a Stephen King again, wouldn’t you say?”

Over all, the book does feel padded –I was struck how much of this could’ve been a novella instead of 300+ page novel. It’s pretty creepy, though, and it does make you think about all the mistakes we make in life, including the price you have to pay (“It's a cash and carry world. Sometimes you pay a little. Mostly it's a lot. Sometimes, it's everything you have,” as Mike Anderson would discover in the 1999 King written TV movie Storm of the Century). There is some gore, some decent suspense, so it does have the King stamp on it; and it’s  fun.

Book: Blaze by Richard Bachman and Stephen King

So, during his wilderness years of writing, Stephen King became two writers, one of noir-type, American fiction and one of horror stories. For those other books, which include Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man and Thinner, he used the name Richard Bachman.

Over the years, after he was outed as Bachman, King has played this game with his constant readers that Richard Bachman was real and existed (I’ve often though King’s novel The Dark Half is his idea of what might happen if Bachman actually lived). I've found this bizarre, but that adds to his quirky nature, I guess. Still, to this day, I've never read any of those Bachman books.

Until now, I guess.

Now, long after Bachman “died,” King resurrects him with Blaze (though I wonder where The Regulators falls here; it being an alternate universe version of King’s Desperation?). While King, in his forward to the book, explains how Blaze came into existence (and that it was part of his psyche of Bachman) he is honest in his opinion of something he wrote 30 plus years ago. Still, the novel reads much like classic King.

While the homage to Of Mice and Men is obvious, it none the less becomes a book you can’t help but enjoy. And while the conclusion is obvious also, you also can’t but root for Blaze, the same way one could not root for Lennie in that classic John Steinbeck novel.

While there is no supernatural stuff seen here, it does feature many classic King-isms, including some nasty-ass characters like the distant father and dead mother. A huge cast of characters, despite it really being a character study between Blaze and dead friend George.