Summer of Stephen
Title: The Long Walk
Publishing Date: 1978 Length: 181 pages Start Date: September 11, 2017 End Date: September 19, 2017 I had high expectations going into The Long Walk. Several of my friends cited it as one of their favorite King books (though it was technically written under his Richard Bachman pseudonym), so I assumed I would love it. And I did. For the most part. The Long Walk begins normally enough. A group of 100 teenage boys is gathering to set out on a race. They have to maintain a minimum speed of 4 mph and if they drop below this, they are granted 30 seconds to get back up to speed. Every time they fail to do so, they receive a warning ticket. If they get three tickets, they’re out of the race. Permanently. Being removed from the race doesn’t mean taking a seat on the sidelines and watching the others finish. If a boy ends up with three tickets, he’s shot by one of the soldiers accompanying the racers, and his body is dragged off the road. And the race can’t end until only one boy is left walking. So why would anyone volunteer for this sort of competition? Sure, the prize for winning is to basically get whatever you want for the rest of your life, but the odds of winning are pretty slim. Each walker has his own motivation, but I wish King had given us even more insight into their reasoning. This would also have helped build the world outside of the walk. On one hand, I like that this story was contained to covering just this one event, but I’m also a fan of completely losing myself in the world of whatever I’m reading. Since all we see is the walk, we never get a true sense of what happened to the world that has led to this sort of competition being accepted by everyone. The characters in this book are great, and King does a good job of giving each one a distinct personality. Getting to know the boys was the best part of the book for me. I especially liked the dynamic between the main character, Garraty, and the mysterious boy at the back of the pack, Stebbins. For a while I started to wonder if Stebbins was a figment of Garraty’s imagination as the walk made him go a little crazy, but then others start to talk to and about him, so that ruined that theory. For the most part, I really enjoyed The Long Walk. I don’t know if it will end up as one of my favorite King books, but I’ll likely read it again at some point in the future. And if I ever teach high school again, I’ll definitely find a way to include this story in the curriculum.
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Jacinta M. CarterProfessional Book Nerd Archives
July 2019
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