“The Long Walk” by Stephen King
Hardcover, 391 pages
Published 1979 as Richard Bachman by Penguin Press
ISBN-10 : 150114426X | ISBN-13 : 978-1501144264
Finished On: June 28, 2021
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon
This book is often mentioned in ultrarunning circles and had been on my list for a while.
The slow build up was amazing and by the last third of the book I simply couldn't put it down, not because I wanted to know who won, necessarily, but more to learn the back story and why seemingly healthy normal boys would choose to willingly compete in such a deadly game. Overall, I really enjoyed it, but by the end I was frustrated that there was so much left unsaid.
My Notes
Then three soldiers from the halftrack passed out wide belts with snap pockets. The pockets were filled with tubes of high-energy concentrate pastes. More soldiers came around with canteens. They buckled on the belts and slung the canteens.
He wondered if he should drink some water. He decided against it. He had never in his life been so aware of his feet.
The tiny radar dishes turned busily, monitoring each Walker's speed with a sophisticated on-board computer. Low speed cutoff was exactly four miles an hour.
But he felt good. He felt fit. He felt like he could walk all the way to Florida. He started to walk faster.
"Thank God! She's loosening!"
No one said anything. Garraty felt a grudging disappointment. It was mean, and unsporting, he supposed, but he wanted to be sure someone got a ticket before he did. Who wants to bow out first?
Only six Long Walks in history had ended over the state line in New Hampshire, and only one had gotten into Massachusetts, and the experts said that was like Hank Aaron hitting seven hundred and thirty home runs, or whatever it was...
He knows it, and he's scared. Garraty suddenly felt his stomach tip over and right itself slowly.
Blisters and charley horses. Garraty shivered. Sudden death. All those muscles, all the training, couldn't stop blisters and charley horses.
"Blisters!" He made it sound like Ewing's mother was a whore. "What the hell can you expect from a dumb n****r? Now I ask you."
He was suddenly and terribly sure that he was looking at the last daylight in his life. He wanted it to stretch out. He wanted it to last. He wanted the dusk to go on for hours.
"Garraty, we're all going to die."
"But hopefully not tonight," Garraty said.
There was a small, pinched feeling in his stomach. I'll never outlast all of them, he thought. Not all of them. But on the other hand, why not. Someone had to.
"Love is fake!" Olson was blaring. "There are three great truths in the world and they are a good meal, a good screw, and a good shit, and that's all!
Each of them had retreated into his own private world of pain and effort. Seconds seemed to telescope into hours.
He was taking careful inventory of himself.
One head, a little confused and crazied up, but basically okay. Two eyes, grainy. One neck, pretty stiff. Two arms, no problem thre. One torso, okay except for a gnawing in his gut that concentrates couldn't satisfy. Two damn tired legs. Muscles aching. ... How long before the legs began to kink and then to bind up, to protest and finally to seize up and stop.
“Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading that?
McVries had walked away. The darkness seemed to isolate each of them, and Garraty felt a shaft of intense loneliness.
They crossed another bridge, this time a cement one that spanned a good-sized river. The water rippled below them like black silk. A few crickets chirred cautiously, and around fifteen past midnight, a spatter of light, cold rain fell.
The rest of the last three and a half hours was nothing but a dream montage, an insomniac's half-sleeping wakemare.
Thinking and isolation, because it doesn’t matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you’re alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.”
... wondered if Barkovitch wasn't really one of the smart ones. With no friends you had no grief.
"It's a fake," McVries said, his voice trembling. "There's no winner, no Prize. They take the last guy out behind a barn somewhere and shoot him too."
"The same reasons we're all doing it," Stebbins said. He smiled gently, almost lovingly. His lips were a little sun-parched; otherwise, his face was still unlined and seemingly invincible. "We want to die, that's why we're doing it. Why else, Garraty? Why else?
Whatever else Stebbins was; he wasn't Superman. He looked up at Garraty for a moment, lean face questioning, and then he dropped his gaze back to the road. The knob of spine at the back of his neck was very prominent.
The others could die, they were extras in the movie of his life, but not Ray Garraty, star of the movie of the long-running hit film, The Ray Garraty Story.
Barkovitch at the front, still trying to look cocky but flaking a bit around the edges; McVries with his head slumped, hands half-clenched, favoring his left foot a little bit.
We both wanted to get away from him, away from our parents, and away from the smell of all that cowshit so the Great Romance could bloom in earnest. [bad dialogue, no teenage boy would say that unless he had literary aspirations and was a big reader, which McVries character is not]
He’s there, Garraty thought, sure he is. Where Stebbins said we’d all go if we stuck with it long enough. How deep inside himself is he? Fathoms? Miles? Light-years? How deep and how dark? And the answer came back to him: too deep to see out. He’s hiding down there in the darkness and it’s too deep to see out.
"Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once." [Stebbins]
He felt a sudden wave of resentment. They would have gone on walking even if he had bought his ticket. No tears shed for him. Just name and number to be entered in the official records—GARRATY, RAYMOND, #47, ELIMINATED 218th MILE.
Garraty fought for control of himself. Maybe he even got a little. But he was unraveling just the same. His legs didn't want to respond smoothly to his mind's commands anymore, they seemed as old and as flickery as ancient lightbulbs.
“He put the jar back with an old man’s palsied care.”
Now Jan was gone, his mother was gone. Irrevocably and for eternity. Unless he won. And now he wanted to win very badly.
It was odd. This was the first time he could remember wanting to win. Not even at the start, when he had been fresh ...
You get in deeper, he thought. It never gets shallower, just deeper, until you're out of the bay and swimming in the ocean. Once all of this had looked simple. Pretty funny, all right.
They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.
I'm going to die now, Garraty."
"All right."
"If you win, will you do something for me?
..."Anything."
... Baker said, "Lead-lined."
No vehicles on the road, you damn fool. That's a capital offense, they can shoot you for that.
The Major stood in the jeep. He held a stiff salute. Ready to grand first wish, every wish, any wish, death wish. The Prize.