by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s novels and collections and assorted other publications in their order of publication. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance set out the challenge for himself and invited others to join in. It is an idea which indulges my obsession with King’s writing. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my long fiction and storytelling. I think there are secrets to be discovered or rediscovered in it too. As Chizmar posts his after read posts and Bev Vincent posts his accompanying history, I will add links to those in my corresponding posts.
Here is Bev Vincent’s historic essay.
Here are Richard Chizmar’s thoughts.
Wrath James White wrote a fantastic essay about The Running Man and the Bachman books in general.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie and follow all the blog posts through each book.
Here is the link the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Much of what I write in these posts will really be notes for me. I will do my best to make them into coherent observations for you. I will also style my comments to be as spoiler free as possible for those who haven’t read the book, but in a way which will also work for those who have read the books. Be warned though that I am discussing the content of the book and the writing.
Let the show begin. Hurry. You only have a twelve hour head start before The Hunters come for you.
The “countdown to the ending” for chapter headings is a good touch. All the way to a horrific blaze of glory ending that was fantastic and unreal at the time, but a horrific reality later.
Ben Richards, the main character, is a bit of a “Mary Jane.” Even when everything is going wrong and he is falling apart, he still seems to manage to do so with near perfection of mind, body, and strategic choice. He sure knows a lot of key historic details when he needs to. He knows about bombs and the intricate details about how a parachute works.
The dystopia is played out on “Free-Vee” which touches on future stories and films. This sub-genre will capture young people’s imaginations in another century. Not sure many of those readers would cozy up well with The Running Man though.
We see a sadistic treadmill game with sick people as contestants. A heart diseased version of the shock therapy experiment played out in real life. An interesting parallel to the actual experience of being ill and tested. This is kind of how I felt having to take the treadmill test for my pre transplant testing.
A sick family is Ben Richards’s motivator for self-destruction. His family remains so as his fate plays out in the final chapters. He gives the middle finger and asks, “Who could I kill if I went right to the top?”
There is a Lake Harding in Alaska and I thought that might be where the story was set, but this Harding is in the Midwest. The air traffic control for the Harding jet port is out of Detroit.
King paints a detailed timeline for his gritty future. A 2013 Humber decays on its axils in Ben’s Co-Op City ghetto. The story is set in 2025, but not much different than a 1970’s New York projected forward forty years and skipping over our timeline entirely for a divergence close to then and far away from now at the same time. They still bear data on punch cards. Voting was done by computer starting in 2014. Just imagine! They use plastic coins, New Dollars, and Games Vouchers with perforations for giving change. Polio came back in 2005. Radical Act of 2004 outlawed racial slurs. North America is one nation. Kill Ball is the favorite sport. France is under martial law. Air cars are for the wealthy and ground cars are for the poor and the cops. Ground cars are still faster though. Derry is still around in 2025. I wonder if King knew how haunted that particular town was going to get as his body of work played out. A-62 tanks fire 1/4 megaton shells, but don’t worry, they have clean nukes in 2025. They also have automatic handguns and the cops carry shock devices to move people along. Lockheed/ General Atomic builds planes. A United Nations treaty in 1995 made air police international.
There is a General Atomic protest over leaky radiation shields. General Atomic is ubiquitous in this imagined future. Maybe a goliath version of General Electric which might have been the biggest company King could imagine in the future.
The word honky appears in graffiti and is used a lot by characters. Everyone is called a maggot by everyone else. The “jive talk” for the black family who helps Ben is a bit much.
I didn’t remember the long testing and selection phase for the games. Richards refuses the sexual favors which are a perk for The Running Man contestants in the sequestered phase before the show starts even though his wife turns tricks for grocery money.
“The easy tears of drunkenness” is a good turn of phrase.
The claustrophobic drain pipe was a scarier scene than I remember from my first reading. I remember it from before. The YMCA and the drain pipe are some of the only things I remember clearly from my first reading, but it didn’t scare me this much the first time.
Amelia Williams has a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome. She gets through it eventually. Whether she gets over the experience, who knows?
At one point, a gun is dropped on the floor. Everyone walks away and there is no discussion of who picks it up. Then, the character who dropped it produced it again. I’m not sure about that.
In a plane, talking about getting shot down over Pennsylvania is a little haunting. Then, using the plane as a tool of vengeance and terror against a corrupt society is a little chilling. The description of it is a bit on the nose too given what we now know in this timeline.
One late twist kind of made the book work for me. Then, a series of following twists drilled the story home. I see why I liked it then at the end and why I like it now.
An offer of escape to a “better” life before the end makes the ending of book more powerful.
The next post will be Before The Gunslinger: Book 1 of The Dark Tower series.
— Jay Wilburn, The Running Man
Jay's Patreon Page | Purchase Signed Books