Book Bearings
The Long Walk
- 352 pages · about 6 hours
- First published 1979
- 39 editions
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1 About this book
The Long Walk is a dystopian horror novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1979, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books, and has seen several reprints since, as both paperback and hardback.
Set in a future dystopian America, ruled by a totalitarian and militaristic dictator, the plot revolves around the contestants of a grueling, annual walking contest. In 2000, the American Library Association listed The Long Walk as one of the 100 best books for teenage readers published between 1966 and 2000.
- Horror
- Thrillers
- Dystopian fiction
- Survival
- Totalitarianism
- Contests
- Walking
- Teenage boys
2 What to expect
A dystopian novel with a simple, terrible premise: each year a hundred teenage boys walk without stopping, and anyone who falls below the pace is shot, until one is left. The whole book is the walk, told from inside one boy's exhaustion, with friendships forming among boys who know that only one can survive. It is tense, bleak and increasingly dreamlike, and it explains very little about the world beyond the road.
Good for readers who want: gripping dystopian fiction, a survival contest, and psychological tension.
3 About Stephen King
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Stephen King
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