# The Long Walk, by Stephen King **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 21, 2005, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997 "2005-01-21T23:19:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![flamingbananas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/f4b2a3/32.png) [@flamingbananas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flamingbananas)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/21 "2005-01-22T04:21:21Z")
> [@KGS](#): > > I wanna know when the film version of _The Long Walk_ is coming out! They are making a film version of _The Long Walk_!? That’ll be a chilling movie. 99 kids have to die. ---
**Author:** ![Turek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/turek/32/18782_2.png) [@Turek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Turek)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/22 "2005-01-22T04:35:16Z")
_The Long Walk_ is one of my favorite King stories. It always leaves me feeling drained when I finish it. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/23 "2005-01-22T04:56:53Z")
> [@ggurl](#): > > **Ellis Dee** , it’s **Four Past Midnight**. The stories are The Langoliers, Secret Window, The Library Policeman and The Sun Dog. No, no, all of those were published under King’s own name, not Bachman’s. And the first four Bachman books were published separately, as novels, before they were collected (the four-novel collection was published **after** King was exposed as Bachman). Jeez. Do you ever type an SDMB post, feeling brilliant, and a moment later find yourself feeling slightly embarrassed that you even know this stuff? ---
**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/24 "2005-01-22T05:56:15Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > No, no, all of those were published under King’s own name, not Bachman’s. And the first four Bachman books were published separately, as novels, before they were collected (the four-novel collection was published **after** King was exposed as Bachman). > > Jeez. > > Do you ever type an SDMB post, feeling brilliant, and a moment later find yourself feeling slightly embarrassed that you even know this stuff? I do all the time. **ggurl** , thanks for the answer, you are correct. I know the other collection was under his real name; I never said he did two collections as Bachman. Also, King very specifically describes the differences between a short story, a novel, and works that fall in between the two in length, as novellas. Also, King himself has specifically said in interviews that he pulled Rage after Columbine. I can’t believe I forgot Roadwork. Okay, I can, because that was my least favorite. Now my memory is really bugging me. There is a third collection of four stories. I can picture the cover art, but not the title. “Summer” something? I think two of the four stories were Apt Pupil and The Body. (Unless Apt Pupil was a short story?) I read it back in the seventies or early eighties, I believe. Any help? ---
**Author:** ![pokey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ebca7d/32.png) [@pokey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pokey)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/25 "2005-01-22T06:10:46Z")
Different Seasons. I will go by memory! Apt Pupil, Breathing Method, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and The Body??? ---
**Author:** ![scotandrsn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a4c791/32.png) [@scotandrsn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scotandrsn)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/26 "2005-01-22T06:29:09Z")
Actually, Different Seasons is the one where King espouses the virtues of the novella as a literary form. The Bachman Books intro is when he compares his using a pseudonym to the Beatles trying to play out incognito. The Bachman Books are not novellas, nor were they ever meant to be. They are novels: two decent ones, one lame one, and one shitty one. I leave the identification of each as an exercise for the reader. ---
**Author:** ![HPL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3da27b/32.png) [@HPL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HPL)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/27 "2005-01-22T07:23:44Z")
> [@Ghost of Marlowe](#): > > I saw the story as a metaphor for the Vietnam war, but I think King denied any (conscious) parallel. It’s hard to tell. Certain Authors tend to deny obvious influences on their work (Tolkien and Wagner is a great one). King pissed me off when he began badmouthing Lovecraft, saying that all his aliens are “Hairy Vaginas” despite the fact that King himself was obviously familar with Lovecraft(“Jerusalem’s Lot”, plus several little references in some of his stories) and should know how stupid that sounds. Yeah, sure you weren’t influenced, Mr. King. ---
**Author:** ![KGS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/90ced4/32.png) [@KGS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KGS)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 8:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/28 "2005-01-22T08:30:12Z")
> [@Ellis Dee](#): > > Also, King himself has specifically said in interviews that he pulled Rage after Columbine. [In a speech given shortly after the Columbine incident](http://www.horrorking.com/interview7.html), King said that _Rage_ had already been taken off the market after the Paducah, Kentucky shooting (which happened on 12/1/97): > [@](#): > > I can’t say for sure that Michael Carneal, the boy from Kentucky who shot three of his classmates dead as they prayed before school, had read my novel, Rage, but news stories following the incident reported that a copy of it had been found in his locker. It seems likely to me that he did. Rage had been mentioned in at least one other school shooting, and in the wake of that one an FBI agent asked if he could interview me on the subject, with an eye to setting up a computer profile that would help identify potentially dangerous adolescents. **The Carneal incident was enough for me. I asked my publisher to take the damned thing out of print.** [bolding mine] Of course, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t said in other interviews that it was Columbine – in fact, I think I remember him saying that on _Biography_, now that you mention it. 🙂 _The Long Walk_ is one of my favorite King books, though it does suffer from an adolescent writing style and some rather glaring errors. For instance, late in the book, Stebbins gets a warning “for only the second time since the Walk began” – in actuality, it’s his third warning. And, all the kids are given numbers by alphabetical order. Garraty is #47, but another kid named Ewing is #9. Does that mean 38 of 100 walkers have a last name starting with F? I suppose it’s possible… And AFAIK, there is no movie version in production. But I still wanna see it! ---
**Author:** ![Sublight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Sublight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sublight)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 8:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/29 "2005-01-22T08:57:08Z")
Probably the closest you’ll get to a _Long Walk_ movie is the Japanese _Battle Royale_, starring Beat Takeshi. Every year, in order to promote discipline among youth, the government (in the book, Japan was never defeated in WWII, so the government is a modernized version of the military-dominated semi-dictatorship of the 40’s) picks a class of high school students to kidnap to a remote island where they’re forced to fight to the death until only one remains. ---
**Author:** ![Agrippina](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8797f3/32.png) [@Agrippina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Agrippina)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/30 "2005-01-22T13:02:54Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > (\*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? ☹ ) Especially now, since the end of the novel deals with the main character crashing a plane into a skyscraper. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/31 "2005-01-22T14:34:42Z")
How did they find people to handle the Nazi Death Camps? One person planted a bomb to blow up a building with a day care in it. 20 people planned to fly four planes into buildings that held thousands. I have no trouble believing such evil exists in greater numbers than we want to acknowledge ---
**Author:** ![pokey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ebca7d/32.png) [@pokey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pokey)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/32 "2005-01-22T16:30:01Z")
I agree. I think one of his favourite themes is why do some people maintain integrity under pressure while others turn evil. That’s what I’ve always liked about his characters. They face an outlandishly adverse situation and we see what happens inside them. I really enjoy that! In the story from Hearts in Atlantis that became a movie (I don’t remember the title) the book Lord of the Flies comes up and I think a lot of the conflict in Stephen King stories is the same. A microcosm group faces some horror and everyone has to face their darker nature, some prevail and some surrender. If you are familiar with a lot of his books you get familiar with his philosophy about why some people become heartless. Mainly, it’s self preservation, and where you wind up will have a lot to do with what you have going for yourself to preserve. Characters who had a strong identification with being good have to stick by it under adversity to preserve their identity. People whose values were sketchy to begin with will only protect their material integrity…like try not to get killed. Those people won’t be brave, they will go along with whatever they have to do to survive (like a Nazi.) It’s a bit of a guilty pleasure though. Just because you identify with his good characters doesn’t mean you would make those choices if you were in the same situation. I think about all the Stephen King fans in the world, obviously not all of them would be brave under pressure the way his protagonists usually are. I can only speak for myself in saying that I enjoy his books because I like think about what I would do in the same situation and imagine that I would be in the good camp. But I’m conscious that anyone would feel that way because often bad people don’t know that they’re bad, weak people are weak because they are too weak to see their own weakness, or they see it but excuse it. I liked Rage a lot because at the time I read it I was in highschool and I liked the real time microcosm-under-extraordinary-pressure scenario. But I remember even then thinking the good and bad characters were a bit on the unrealistic side. Like the loser girl was pretty much unbathed if I recall. But I found it gratifiying to identify with the kids who passed the test and to see the seediness of some characters exposed. When you are in school, you see so many kids you \*know \* are bad succeed, and get accolades for their phoney goodness. Over time I am a bit more demanding, but over time Stephen King’s characters have become more nuanced, so I still love him. ---
**Author:** ![ivylass](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9de053/32.png) [@ivylass](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ivylass)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/33 "2005-01-22T16:45:27Z")
Maybe someone can explain the ending of _The Long Walk_ to me? IIRC, the winner of the Walk gets whatever he wants for the rest of his life. The ending was ambiguous, and I don’t know what it was supposed to signify. Did the winner go mad at the end? Was there a catch to winning? ---
**Author:** ![flamingbananas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/f4b2a3/32.png) [@flamingbananas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flamingbananas)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/34 "2005-01-22T16:48:57Z")
Is _Rage_ completely out of print now? I would like to read it. ---
**Author:** ![ivylass](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9de053/32.png) [@ivylass](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ivylass)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/35 "2005-01-22T17:02:26Z")
> [@flamingbananas](#): > > Is _Rage_ completely out of print now? I would like to read it. I think your best bet would be to go to a used bookstore or a library. King pulled it himself, and I don’t think he will re-release it again. ---
**Author:** ![devilsknew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@devilsknew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/devilsknew)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/36 "2005-01-22T17:14:56Z")
> [@HPL](#): > > It’s hard to tell. Certain Authors tend to deny obvious influences on their work (Tolkien and Wagner is a great one). King pissed me off when he began badmouthing Lovecraft, saying that all his aliens are “Hairy Vaginas” despite the fact that King himself was obviously familar with Lovecraft(“Jerusalem’s Lot”, plus several little references in some of his stories) and should know how stupid that sounds. Yeah, sure you weren’t influenced, Mr. King. Hmm…didn’t know he ever made that comment about Lovecraft. Seems like the hairy vagina alien must have imprinted-- I mean, what the hell are the _shitweasels_ in _Dreamcatcher_, if not hairy vaginas with teeth? Think it’s a either a conscious or subconscious tribute to Lovecraft? ---
**Author:** ![Turek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/turek/32/18782_2.png) [@Turek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Turek)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 5:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/37 "2005-01-22T17:20:45Z")
> [@ivylass](#): > > I think your best bet would be to go to a used bookstore or a library. King pulled it himself, and I don’t think he will re-release it again. Just to be clear here… your chances of finding _Rage_ as a stand-alone book are virtually nil. Pick up a copy of _The Bachman Books_ and read it there. If you DO find a copy of _Rage_, I’ll give you … uh … $10 for it. ---
**Author:** ![Turek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/turek/32/18782_2.png) [@Turek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Turek)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/38 "2005-01-22T17:22:05Z")
> [@devilsknew](#): > > Hmm…didn’t know he ever made that comment about Lovecraft. Seems like the hairy vagina alien must have imprinted-- I mean, what the hell are the _shitweasels_ in _Dreamcatcher_, if not hairy vaginas with teeth? Think it’s a either a conscious or subconscious tribute to Lovecraft? That book doesn’t exist in the world I live. Nor the movie. ---
**Author:** ![pokey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ebca7d/32.png) [@pokey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pokey)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/39 "2005-01-22T17:22:58Z")
> [@devilsknew](#): > > Hmm…didn’t know he ever made that comment about Lovecraft. Seems like the hairy vagina alien must have imprinted-- I mean, what the hell are the _shitweasels_ in _Dreamcatcher_, if not hairy vaginas with teeth? Think it’s a either a conscious or subconscious tribute to Lovecraft? Hairy vaginas that can crawl up a man’s ass and impregnate him. Ha ha. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![pokey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ebca7d/32.png) [@pokey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pokey)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2005, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997/40 "2005-01-22T17:25:41Z")
> [@Turek](#): > > That book doesn’t exist in the world I live. Nor the movie. It was pretty bad, but I always try to blot out From a Buick 8. “What about a car… that just stays in the garage!! WOAH THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES FOR MENACE!” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-long-walk-by-stephen-king/285997.md?page=3)