The Long Walk

I've had a rocky relationship this past year and a half with Stephen King, in which I've struggled a bit too much to enjoy a lot of his writing that a lot of other people seem to love. Fortunately, the blog is just absolutely crawling with King posts made by other bloggers, so I've had quite a few opportunities to read up on the very wide array of work the famous author has put forth. One such posted item that always stuck with me was Sween's Long Walk entry a few years back, where he described a very dark tale of a hundred teenage boys walking for days on end under penalty of death for stopping or even slowing down. The concept intrigued me in its simplicity, and I recently bought the book for that very reason.

I started it last night, finished it this morning, and enjoyed it immensely. One of my biggest struggles with King to date has been a propensity to just stop reading his stories for weeks on end. Two of his Dark Tower books - the better two of the three I've read, actually - took me multiple months to finish even though neither was absurdly long. Under the Dome - which was absurdly long - took me the better half of a year. But The Long Walk, despite being 370 pages and no thin volume on its own right, just sucked me right in from the beginning.

There really isn't much more to the book than is given away by the summary or Sweeney's post. In a vaguely described totalitarian state in an alternate America, a yearly contest is held in which a hundred teenage boys just keep walking - just keep "picking them up and putting them down" - until ninety-nine of them have been shot dead for slowing down or stopping. The winner is awarded "the prize," the details of which are basically left up to him; most boys simply envision millions of dollars, all sorts of special privileges and recognition, and scores of beautiful girls and women

The book mostly alternates between describing the group's slowly waning strength - mental, emotional, physical - and just listening in as they banter with each other like high school kids will do. There's a lot of talk about girls, dreams for the future, backgrounds and childhoods - the whole thing is a pretty thin metaphor for young men in a foxhole bonding and then dying. It's an interesting anti-war sentiment; Vietnam ended or otherwise ruined a lot of young American lives, but it's not like the Vietnam War was a voluntary contest with a 99% lethality rate.

One of the recurring questions the kids ask each other throughout the book is, "why are you here?" In truth, many seem unable to rationalize it to themselves, and a few articulate that they didn't really fully realize the life-and-death nature of the walk; most agree, not long into the walk at all, that they'd gladly forfeit the "prize" and back out now for a chance to walk away with their lives. One of the more cryptic kids remarks about halfway through the book that every last one of them knew why they were here, but wouldn't admit to it: because they all had a death wish.

It wasn't a perfect book, ultimately, and the end fell just a little bit flat after the build up from the previous 350 pages or so, but then, maybe that was intentional; maybe the end of this horrific ordeal was always going to feel a little bit flat and numb and not very exciting, so why try to spruce it up with a flourish of action or a twist ending? For me, it was just nice to see Stephen King staying in his own comfort zone. These were young men with varying personalities, walking through the state of Maine. (No awkward racially spiteful rape victim amputees here, and no arbitrary alternate world map to create and then repeatedly contradict.)

Anyway, again, I was a big fan of this book, and that's honestly the first Stephen King book I can say that about. (I'm still trying to reserve judgment on The Dark Tower until I can consider the whole and not just the individual parts.)