Ok, the book is silly. I wanted that to show up on the preview, so you would all know how I felt immediately. There be spoilers here, although I really don’t know if anyone cares.
All that being said, there was one thing that fascinated me greatly - the soldiers. It says they were “hand-picked” from the Guards (whatever that is), and are described as being very neutral and calm the whole time. Even when one of the soldiers is *killed * by the Walkers, the others shoot the Walker calmly in the back and carry on.
I saw things from the point of the soldiers many times. Like, it must be a difficult job, shooting sixteen or seventeen year olds in the back, or in the head. I’m sure they didn’t volunteer for it.
The whole idea of these men having to follow these kids along and give the warnings, and shoot them intrigued me. Or maybe I read it wrong, and maybe they were supposed to be unspeakably cruel. But since everything was from the perspective of one of the children, who really knows?
Do we have it in us to that kind of job? And does anyone understand what I am talking about?
I never imagined it from their point of view. I just saw them as a plot device to move the story along. I actually liked it, and it made me cry at the end.
You’re talking about a society that enjoys watching teen aged boys walking to thier death. I don’t think it would be very difficult to find a group of men who would be callus enough to shoot them without it bothering them.
I completely forgot about that book for a while. Loved it. I didn’t think it was silly at all (had such a good time reading it, I suppose I didn’t really think about the improbabilities). As for the soldiers, well, it was supposed to be in the future. They could have gone through some (painful) special mind altering desensitizing process. Or maybe they’re robots. Or maybe they have some kind of mind control chip in their heads. Or maybe they were infused with Mako. Or maybe…oh man, why’d you have to go and get me started?
And I don’t think a society that likes to watch teenage boys is that far off from us. I’m not saying we’re horrible but there is an element of barbarism that the human race has never been able to shuck off.
Boy, I’m getting philosophical. Time to go wash some dishes. I’ll be back later, though.
I don’t think it’s silly. Look at the direction “reality television” shows are heading. We’ve got people eating live spiders and maggoty road kill, enduring intense physical tests, and putting themselves in environments that cause great emotional instability–all for the sake of winning cash prizes.
It’s been a loooong time since I’ve read The Long Walk, probably 15 years or more. IIRC, the boys weren’t forced to participate. They DID volunteer, and the winner would receive a HUGE amount of money as a prize and would basically be set for life and considered a hero.
I don’t recall the soldiers being described in very much detail at all, with possibly one exception–their commander perhaps?. As Speaker noted, they were just a plot device.
Anyway, I thought it was silly not so much in the way it was written, but that it was 400 pages about boys walking and getting shot down. That’s all. The book opens on the walk and closes on the walk.
Not quite. It was a novella. Four novellas were combined to make a single 400 page book. Oh, trivia time. What was the original title, and what were the other three books?
I don’t know offhand, but here’s my guess:[spoiler]The Bachman Books
The Long Walk
The Running Man
(That kid-goes-crazy-in-school story that got pulled from circulation after Columbine)
The Sun Dog (Killer dog comes out of polaroid camera.)[/spoiler]Am I close? What was the other 4-novella book he wrote called, and what were the four stories in that one?
The Long Walk, like The Running Man,* is a dystopia. (Remember, King is a Baby Boomer and grew up at least touched by the radical influences of the counterculture, and this was 1979, when such things in America’s future still seemed plausible to many people. Come to think of it, they might seem even more plausible today, but I digress.) The leader – known only as “the Major” or “the Colonel,” I forget which (definitely not “the General”), is the military dicator of America, and, although few details are given, apparently his political ideology glorifies extreme machismo, courage, sacrifice, and survival-of-the-fittest – all of which are supposedly demonstrated by the “Long Walk” contest. “The Squads” are analogous to the El Salvador death squads of the '70s and '80s, if they had been actual agents of the government. Their main job is to eliminate political dissidents. One of the characters speaks of one of his family members as having been “Squadded” – which seems to mean either “disappeared,” or publicly summarily executed.
In that setting, finding soldiers willing to publicly shoot 99 young men in cold blood and in front of the TV cameras hardly seems implausible. It’s not far removed from their ordinary duties.
In fact, it’s not that implausible even in real-life terms. Has any dictatorship, in any country where such came to power, ever failed to find people willing to do the dirty work? The Indonesian troops occupying East Timor, Pinochet’s troops in Chile, the troops serving the SLORC regime in Burma, and no doubt the North Korean police (although with NK it’s hard to know much), all act/acted just like King/Bachman’s Squad troops.
(*I always knew The Running Man was much too radical and subversive to be made into a Hollywood movie with any part of the original story intact. Was I right, or was I right? )
There were five Bachman books: Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man, and Thinner. The first four were repackaged as The Bachman Books after King’s nom de plume was found out. Thinner was reissued under King’s own name. (Of course there’s also Desperation, but that was a marketing gimmick many years down the road.)
Rage was pulled not because of Columbine, but another school shooter (Kentucky?) who had a copy of the book in his locker.
I wanna know when the film version of The Long Walk is coming out!
It was “Rage”, not “The Rage.” I didn’t care for it or “Road Work”, in that they both feature main characters who go nuts for no apparant or at least clear reason
In fact, it is the main character, Ray Garraty, whose father was “squadded.” It is clearly narrated, through Garraty’s thoughts, that his father was a loudmouth who spoke openly against the government and one day was simply picked up at home and taken away by government agents, never to be seen again.
Afterwards, Garraty’s mother strikes him when he speaks of his father, and warns him never to speak of him again. So clearly the Squads make people disappear, and have elicited genuine terror in the populace. Sort of like the way people were made “unpersons” in “1984.”
That’s King’s style, he does it in a lot of his books. He writes about people suffering and he piles on detail after detail, page after page. It can get tedious but it’s often very emotionally effective. In The Stand, the “Trashcan Man’s” long walk through the desert to Las Vegas, while dying of thirst and hallucinating, really grabbed me. And don’t get me started on Gerald’s Game!
[QUOTE=KGS]
There were five Bachman books: Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man, and Thinner. The first four were repackaged as The Bachman Books after King’s nom de plume was found out. Thinner was reissued under King’s own name. (Of course there’s also Desperation, but that was a marketing gimmick many years down the road.)*
Don’t forget The Dark Half, which is kind of a Bachman book – it wasn’t published under his name, but the plot was obviously inspired by King’s experience with the Bachman pseudonym,
My guess? Never, and if it ever is made it will be no more recognizable than the Running Man movie, and for exactly the same reasons. (And the right-wingers are always talking about “Hollywood liberals”! )
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