Book Bearings
The Running Man
- 256 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1982
- 40 editions
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
The Running Man is a dystopian thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, first published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982 as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the omnibus The Bachman Books. The novel is set in a dystopian United States during the year 2025, in which the nation's economy is in ruins and world violence is rising.
The story follows protagonist Ben Richards as he participates in the reality show The Running Man in which contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are chased by the general public, who get a huge bounty if they kill him.
The book has a total of 101 chapters, laid out in a "countdown" format. The first is titled "Minus 100 and Counting ..." with the numbers decreasing, ending with the last chapter called "Minus 000 and Counting" (or, in some versions, simply "000").
Good for readers who want: horror and science fiction.
- Horror
- Thrillers
- Science fiction
- Dystopian fiction
- Crime scenes
- Survival skills
- World history
- Game shows
2 About Stephen King
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
3 More by Stephen King
4 Similar books
- The 5th Wave by Richard Yancey
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
- Kraken by China Miéville
- Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard
- World War Z by Max Brooks
- The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Lost World by Michael Crichton