The Long Walk
Written: Dec 17 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Original story, great pacing
Cons: Weak ending
The Bottom Line: The Long Walk could have been great if it had a better ending.
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| phungus's Full Review: Long Walk Books |
I have never considered myself a Stephen King fan. I respect his ability as an author to create such a massively successful catalogue of books, but a lot of his stuff is hit and miss. Some authors put out a book every few years and they are great, but King churns out novels like I do reviews on this site. I still think he uses a quantity over quality approach to a lot of his work and that's why even his most die-hard fans will admit that several of his books are not worth reading.
The last King book I read was a collection of short stories called Night Shift. It was one of his earlier novels and had only a few really good stories in it. The rest were like snippets of stories and had really weak or anticlimactic endings, like they were given up on instead of properly finished. Prior to Nigh Shift, I had gotten four books into the Dark Tower series and am thoroughly enjoying them. So you see, my taste in King goes both ways. The Long Walk is one of King's stories that builds and builds, but the ending is so weak that it made the final destination not worth the trip. I was waiting for more of a big, shocking ending after so much momentum, but was seriously let down.
The Long Walk has such a killer opening that I was hooked. The hook is literally a killer. The premise of the story is that a group of selected young people compete in a military-sponsored endurance race called The Long Walk. It starts out with a bunch of teenage boys standing around a road and discussing their strategies for winning, then some military people drive up and hand out these little sensors for tracking their movement. The boys are reminded that they can't slow to less than 4 miles per hour or they will be issued a warning. Three warnings will get you a ticket. Your first ticket will put you out of the Long Walk.
So then the boys start walking. People are lined up along the roads to cheer them on like it was some kind of parade or marathon. The boys all talk like young boys do, about girls and sex and nasty habits. They make bets on who will win and who will be the first to get a ticket. About twenty or so pages in, one of the boys gets a charley horse and begins to stumble. He is issued a warning for slowing down, but he can't get moving again. A second warning is issued, but the pain in his leg won’t subside. "It's not fair," he screams over and over. Then he gets a ticket.
A boy who violates one of the many rules of the Long Walk will receive a ticket in the form of four bullets fired by the armed soldiers following alongside the walkers in a truck. The first boy gets them all in the head. Up until this point, I had it in the back of my mind that this would happen, but I wasn't sure. Part of me expected the boys to get attacked by something on the road or that they would walk into some kind of war zone, but I didn't expect it to turn into a shooting gallery. After the first boy goes down, another one is shot every few pages as their numbers dwindle down.
From beginning to end, this entire story takes place on the Long Walk. The heart of the story is how the boys interact with each other and how they are so accepting of their fate. It is not until the third act that the reader learns why they got involved in such a thing to begin with, and a little information is given about the selection process. The boys question each other about why they got involved, but the story never gives a clear message on their motivation or the type of society where something like this would be accepted.
Stephen King does an excellent job of describing the physical and mental degradation of all the characters as they walk non-stop for several days. Each character is unique and something different happens in each town, so the story maintains its momentum all the way to the end. Only in a few short scenes does anyone seem to protest the blatant murder of the contestants and only one concerned mother shows up to look for her son. I wish that King had written more to explain the background of the setting and the government and the events that lead up to the Long Walk being held. It is all set in America and he describes the landscapes and stores in such a way that they could be in the year 2050 or 1950.
A story such as this needs a good ending and Stephen King does not deliver. I was expecting some kind of explanation or catch to bring this thing to a close. Instead, you get a loosely-worded abrupt ending that leaves you hanging. This would have been a great story had the ending given more of a punch in the stomach delivery instead of a weak slap on the wrist.
Recommended:
No
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