The Long Walk - Stephen King

    

⭐ 6.5/10

This book is pretty mid. I'm not entirely sure what it is that I didn't like, it just didn't hit the way I was hoping it would. I read this book as a prerequisite for the movie that just came out because the movie looks like it has very positive reviews. If the film adaptation has good reviews, the source material must be good right? Well... sort of. This book has some interesting attributes to it. For one, this was supposed to be a critique on the Vietnam war which definitely comes through in a poignant and thought provoking manner, and the writing is fairly good for Stephen King standards which for the most part makes for an enjoyable read. I just couldn't get into it as much as I wanted to despite the interesting premise. I unfortunately feel that the premise of this book is more compelling than the work itself.

Essentially, there is this long standing tradition in this book's version of America called the Long Walk. This Long Walk is a walking marathon where young men can volunteer to enter, and after completing physicals and receiving acceptance letters, they walk until they can no longer. Once someone's body gives out, they're shot on the spot, and the rest continue until only one remains. There are some rules to the walk however. For one, the walkers must maintain a pace of 4 mph, their pace being monitored by small computers that they wear on their belt. They walk from dawn until midnight each day and rest briefly before continuing, and finally, they each have 3 warning that they will get if their pace becomes too slow. Each warning lasts 5 minutes so effectively, they have 15 minutes each day to use as a break as needed. All that being said, many young men who are in desperate situations sign up, and try their best to win fame, fortune, influence, in all honesty its kind of ambiguous as to what the winner receives but its supposed to be good. It also seems like there is a long running history of this event and in each town that the walkers walk through, people line the streets to get scraps of clothing, pieces of hair, any souvenir they can get their hands on to show that they were present at the walk. The crowds jeer and shout when they see a death and they are constantly on alert to see the violence unfold. No one seems to know when the walks started or what happens after but everyone seems to love the events, treating the walkers like some sort of gladiators, competing against each other but also competing against their own physicality. It's gruesome, dystopian, ugly, but people just can't seem to look away.

Obviously, you can see the parallels to the Vietnam war. Young men being sent to a senseless death fighting a fight they had no real reason to be fighting, all while people in their safe, glass boxes look at the photos and jeer at the violence. This is probably the best thing about the book because King does do a great job showing the senselessness of violence in war and the seemingly meaningless death and destruction that war brings not just to foreign countries but to our own backyards. That being said, there are some negatives. King is usually pretty vulgar in at least a small portion of each of his books. Normally, they're pretty easy to get through, but when King writes as adolescent boys, or young men, he tends to take it up a notch. Now as a man who remembers being a young man, I know how crass boys can get, but sometimes it feels like King adds details that are overly crass for the sake of shock. Something else I wasn't into was how little climb there was in the book. It felt like there wasn't a crescendo, or a climax. Going along with this, there isn't really any satisfaction in the ambiguity the book brings. Namely, I'm speaking of the origins of the walk and what it is for in the context of the world in the book. Both of these critiques could be explained as intentional tools that King uses to drive the Vietnam war allegory in the book, however due to the moderate pace of the book and unsatisfying ending, it ends up falling flat by the end of the novel. Usually you can really only have one, an ambiguous ending, or a moderate pace, but to have both in such a short novel makes it seem dull at times.

All in all, it was a slow burn that fizzles and flickers the whole way. Its worth reading because it's not super long and its not difficult and the concept is pretty good, but at the end of the day, it is a book about walking. Granted it's probably as interesting as a book on walking can be. I look forward to the movie. Hopefully the movie can give this concept more breathing room.