The Long Walk was one of the first Stephen King books I read. I read it in the 7th grade when I was 12 years old. That was the year I first discovered King, thanks to some mild encouragement from my mom, and while this wasn’t my first King book (that was It or The Talisman, I believe), I think it was my first Bachman book. I noticed even then that the Bachman books had a grim, cynical humor to them that King’s books didn’t have as much of and which I found very tantalizing as a 12 year old angry pre-teen. I went into reading The Long Walk relatively blind, and when the first kid bought his ticket, screaming about the injustice of dying over a charlie horse, I remember sitting thunderstruck in class, unable to believe what I had just read.

Way before The Hunger Games, or Battle Royale, or even The Running Man, there was The Long Walk, a story set in an alternate US in an unspecified year about a group of teen boys ranging in age from 14 to 17 who sign up for The Walk – an annual event in which 100 boys must walk at 4 mph until they’re the last one standing. If a boy drops below 4 mph, they’re warned. After 3 warnings, the boys are unceremoniously shot and killed by patrolling soldiers.

The most curious and fascinating aspect of the book is that this isn’t some conscripted service the boys are drafted into like in The Hunger Games. These boys signed up for this – and not just signed up for it, but were tested and vetted. They have to take psychological and intellectual exams, and pass a physical before they’re accepted, and even then only 100 boys are picked to walk with 100 others on backup. They even have 2 separate back out dates during the process so they can withdraw without any penalties.

So why sign up for this? Why subject themselves to this torture? What circumstances could have possibly occurred in the US to allow such a horrible spectacle to occur each year, and why would it be so widely and fully accepted? That’s something that the book grapples with throughout, and there’s no easy answers provided. It’s not like this takes place in Panem in a post-apocalyptic America in which the original government has fallen. The Long Walk is set in a recognizably modern USA – the Walkers start in a small town in Maine, much like most of Stephen King’s books, and they walk along the eastern seaboard, passing through real recognizable towns like Augusta. 

While it’s never explicitly discussed, it’s clear that something occurred to cause this shift. One of the characters mentions “back when there were millionaires” – but it’s clear that there are definite economic classes represented by the boys throughout, so it’s not as if this is a socialist “all are equal by force” dystopia. There are squads that listen for dissension, and if you’re caught speaking out against the Long Walk, you’re “squadded” – meaning a squad of soldiers show up and carry you away – although to what is unclear. To your death? To forced labor? One kid says “better squadded than deaded” but it’s not actually clear if that’s true or whether those that are squadded are taken away for an off-site, private execution. The only thing that’s clear is that people have either embraced the barbaracy of the Walk or are too afraid to speak out for fear of being disappeared – sort of like the world of The Purge series.

So why did these boys sign up? Because the winner gets “whatever they want, anything, for the rest of their life.” And it implies that there’s very little cap on that – one boy threatens a soldier patrolling the Walk by saying that he’s going to wish to have the guard executed as part of his winnings.

One of my favorite things about the book is that the brutality of the Walk is not secret. Everyone knows it’s a survival game, and the winner is the last boy standing, literally. But as the main character Ray Garrety says, he expected the guns to pop out little red flags that say bang. And there’s a fair amount of gallows humor for a while – the boys stay in good spirits even as other boys are gunned down for slowing too often or sitting down or getting leg cramps or blisters. Lots of the early deaths are boys who don’t take the threat seriously, even after seeing others gunned down. They somehow believe that there are exceptions or exemptions to the rules, such as illness or injury, and it’s only as they’re staring down the barrel that they realize the truth. There are no exceptions. If you slow down, you’re warned. If you’re warned too many times, you die. 

Those warnings are delivered whether you’re conscious or not. While the Walkers can use them to help judge how fast or slow they should be walking so they can set a pace, and it often works to startle them into picking up the pace, they’re really just formalities. A boy convulsing in the middle of the road isn’t able to hear or acknowledge a warning that he’s fallen below 4 mph, but the soldiers still deliver them in regimented succession anyway so that when the executing gunshot comes, it can’t be said that they didn’t warn him.

This has always been one of my low key favorite Stephen King books, and one that I think is slept on too much. It’s a YA dystopian novel from way before such a genre existed, and it’s a brutal look at what happens to the human psyche when someone is forced to walk or die – walk until they die. While the Walkers may start in good spirits, there comes a point when they’re tired beyond reason, many are sick and bleeding, but they all know that if they stop for even a moment, they’ll be killed, and so they have to keep going. It’s walk or die. Stopping is the same thing as suicide.

These “compete to the death” stories are most often used as a metaphor for the dehumanizing brutality of capitalism, but during this reading, I kept focusing on the depictions of the crowds who showed up in droves to watch the Walkers. Even as their physical condition deteriorated, as shoes were literally walked to pieces, as they walked their feet until they were bare, bleeding, and raw. The crowds cheer them on through it all. At first, it seems encouraging, but as half-mad boys are gunned down in front of them, the cheers only grow louder, and it becomes clear the carnage is part of the attraction.

As these boys trudge inevitably towards their deaths, they pass signs of support – boys scouts and parents groups, and restaurants all posting signs expressing the warmest regards and heartiest of cheers to this year’s Walkers, as if that means anything to these boys who are almost certainly going to die. They’re even given a pseudo-military treatment from the actual military. At intermittent points during the Walk, they are given honors such as a 400 gun salute – a traumatizing thing to these boys to whom gunfire has come to mean that yet another one of them has died. Sometimes “The Major” – a military official who is in charge of the Walk and is at least the face of the event if not the organizer and originator himself – will show up and give a rousing speech or ride past them in a military jeep and salute them. All of this pomp and circumstance, this lip service used to praise these boys, is hollow and meaningless. It doesn’t change what the boys are going through. It doesn’t change how broken the so-called winner will be when they come out the other side of the Walk. It’s ultimately entertainment and a way for the spectators to feel good about themselves – after all, they’re offering support, they’re cheering them on. At least these boys will hear people happily calling their name and cheering for them as they die. No matter that the cheers are most fervent when someone is dying, that the cheers aren’t actually for the boys but the bloodlust of seeing another sacrifice for their entertainment.

I kept thinking about military service in the United States. The US military is entirely volunteer based – the only time that we’ve used conscripted service as far as I can recall is for Vietnam in the 70s. The people who volunteer for service are absolutely brave for doing so, and I don’t want it to sound like I’m disparaging them for their decisions, nor do I want to make it sound like military service is pointless like the Walk. While there are political and philosophical discussions that can be held about the role of the military, when war breaks out, it’s these volunteers who are deployed, who jump in to serve and protect their country. 

However, it’s also true that military recruitment is often targeted at those who live in the poorest areas, and a sizeable percentage of that volunteer-based service is comprised of those with very few other prospects. The simple fact is, if you sign up to be in the military, you could be deployed, you could see combat, and you could die overseas. But that’s all glossed over during recruitment, and the focus is placed on the benefits you can get – government healthcare, college education, a place to live, regularly provided hot meals, and the ability to travel and see the world. While those are real benefits, most folks know that the US government fails to properly take care of its vets whenever they finally come home, especially those who come back from combat. The return home can often feel like being cut loose completely, with very little support provided to ease the transition or to treat whatever issues or ailments they may have brought back with them.

The Republican Party in the US particularly loves a soldier in uniform. They love to salute them, to thank them for their service, to sing patriotic songs, to wear American flag pins and sport We Support Our Troops bumper stickers. And let’s make sure they get that 20% discount for their meals at Denny’s. But programs that could be a benefit to these soldiers, such as providing better healthcare, reintegration training, therapy, etc., those programs get tabled, cut, and ignored.

That’s what I kept thinking of as these poor boys bonded and formed doomed friendships, pushed each other to keep going, knowing full well that they were all going to die, and whoever doesn’t will be left forever broken and haunted by the experience. While military service, by its nature, lacks that “every-man-for-himself” aspect of the Walk, I couldn’t stop seeing the similarity of the empty pageantry and the hollow, disingenuous cheers of support given to those who volunteered for such dangerous, deadly work.