The Running Man

In the version of the audiobook that I listened to, there is a retrospective forward by King that mentions that the pseudonym Richard Bachman could serve as a vector for his angry and aggressive tendencies. While I generally like King, this side of him is not my favourite.

I have read plenty of unpleasant bleak dystopian novels that I have enjoyed, but basically every moment of this one is full of rage and there is very little time for anything else. There is a lot of aggressive language even just in the description of characters, though some of that maybe also is just a reflection of the time in which it is written, and even just the "victories" present throughout the book are just sort of nihilistic.

I feel like I never really got a good sense of the world, and there are a lot of ideas that are brought up briefly and discarded. Maybe it would have worked better if I was into the book more, because I do think its interesting to come into this story without a bunch of leadup into how The Running Man came about, but it still just felt pretty thin to me.

King is unquestionably a gifted thriller writer though, so there are many scenes of action or suspense that had my full engagement moment to moment, I just don't think it worked as a whole for me.

I really really wanted to love this book. I read the longest walk also by Stephen King, and it is now one of my favourite books of all time, so I was really looking forward to reading another one of his dystopian future books.


It started out great, as usual just the writing skill itself is amazing in this book. Reading it felt like I was watching an action packed movie, and I was thinking how it has to be made into a movie if it hasn't been yet (it has).

When the main game started and the conspiracies started coming to light it was interesting then too, but as he started going from place to place with basically the same thing happening everywhere, it started to get really boring and tedious, and just felt like it was going nowhere.


I understand where King (Bachman) was trying to go with the plot, and I understood that it was building up to something, but it was just taking way way WAY too long to get there.


The ending wasn't necessarily disappointing, but I can't say that I didn't see it coming. I saw the end of the long walk coming too, but in that novel the build up to what I knew but didn't want to believe would happen was written and described so beautifully, the ending left me nearly in tears.


With this novel however I was just glad I was finally done with the book.


How well written this novel was and how much I enjoyed for the long walk will keep me still reading his novels, but this one definitely let me down a little bit.

i read this in preparation to watch the film so i could listen to the new KINGCAST and follow along! and... i liked it! a good amount! it was a fun dystopian story with a future that's pretty recognizable to our own. a single narrative focus, which i'm really fond of. a pretty compelling (if sort of standard, boring, not NEW by any means) main character. a really good length! and a pretty tense format, what with the counting down throughout all of the chapters.

some complaints: i would have liked some more scenes centered around trying to evade the hunters, as opposed to the standoff format that came a little over halfway through. everything between ben starting out and him taking whatshername hostage was really tense, and while the rest of it was still pretty tense, i wanted a little more of the before parts.

also, king's prose just gets a little tiresome at some points. especially when it's about a COMPLETELY fictional world. it's easy to just completely lose track of what he's saying. sometimes i'm into that, but i feel like it just didn't really fit in with the character he created here? and one thing that always strikes me is it that feels like he writes narration like it's from the point of view of the character it's focusing on. and in this case, his weird rambling paragraphs didn't really fit. neither did the racism/homophobia, either. it's easier to excuse when it's characterizing a negative person (even though i don't particularly care for it then, either) but it just didn't make sense to me for ben, here.

Can a father with an issue of authority, fervent distaste for the world, and limited inner strength be a shining light to the general masses who want him dead? That's a question that teeters through Steven King's “The Running Man,” a book that carries underline critiques of corruption and hampers on the social injustice of class structure.

The book was published in 1982 and is surprisingly set in the not-too-distant future of 2025. A future that is close to home on so many levels. Basically, the world is crumbling economically, and most people live in an impoverished state. Our main character, Ben Richards, needs a large sum of money to help get his sick daughter treated. He decides to enroll in a violent game show run by the government in hopes of raising funds. Little does he know that he will appear on the Running Man segment, where he will be hunted down by a hitman. The more days he survives, the more money he receives. Oh, and did I mention nobody who has been on this particular program has survived? Easy-peasy, right?

|| “Protest did not work. Violence did not work. The world was what it was, and Ben Richards moved through it like a thin scythe, asking for nothing” ||

Ben has an exciting time in Co-op City. Every day before 12 a.m., he must film several minutes of himself and mail the finished product to the TV studio. The studio producer takes said tapes and dubs voices over them, making Ben out to be a menace to society when the footage airs on prime time. A few colorful metaphors about authority does the trick. This enrages citizens and encourages them to turn him in.

|| “These people,” Richards said, “only want to see someone bleed. The more the better.” ||

Once Ben's feet hit the ground running, he seeks a disguise, a car, and bogus identification papers from a shadow broker and a few gang members. This allows him to dress as a visually impaired priest as he makes his way from New York to Boston and eventually to Derry.

A thriller I couldn't put down. It was exciting and action-packed and I didn't predict the ending at all. I was forewarned by many previous reviews, so I'll state it too: DON'T read the intro to the book or it will spoil the ending. The ending wasn't that great, in my opinion, but still, you won't want it ruined.