Continuing my quest to read all of Stephen King’s published works with this Richard Bachman dystopian thriller, published in 1982. The Running Man is set in a 2025 America with extreme income inequality, a polluted environment, an authoritarian government, and a population obsessed and controlled by streaming media and ultra-violent reality TV.
The hero of the story is Benjamin Richards, who signs up for the most dangerous “Free-Vee” show to save his sick daughter. Richards is tough, gritty, and smart. A badass that we rarely see as a protagonist in a Stephen King novel (hence the Richard Bachman pseudonym).
Hijinks ensue as Richards attempts to evade his would-be game show killers. It’s a fast-paced read with some good plot twists. I won’t spoil the ending, other than to say it’s another example of King’s uncanny ability to predict future events.
What a fun, creepy book! I loved the slow build of suspense and the unexpected twists. And the ending … Whew.
It’s hard to believe this was written almost sixty years ago. So much of it still feels fresh. Levin created a blueprint for generations of suspense and horror writers to follow.
I read this one before, some twenty years ago, but I didn’t remember much of it other than the setting: a log cabin set on a lake in western Maine. I had a hankering to revisit this place long locked away in my memory.
This is a classic haunted house with enough mystery and spooky parts to keep the pages turning. We meet many of the residents of this lakeside Maine setting, and King captures both the joy and discontent of multi-generational life in an isolated community. Having spent over twenty years on a rural island in Washington state, I laughed and cringed at the similarities.
But, like most good Stephen King novels, it’s the exploration of the deeper human condition that lingers. In this case, the grief of losing a soulmate and how a loss like that changes you.
Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.
The narrator is a well-known writer who suffers from a debilitating bout of writer’s block. Through him, we learn a lot about the highs and lows of the publishing industry. The title is borrowed from a Thomas Hardy quote after he stopped writing novels: “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” It’s a humble admission from our generation’s greatest storyteller that, as effortless as the final product seems to readers, writing is a tough business.
Highlights
I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.
This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things – fish and unicorns and men on horseback – but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
I’m continuing my quest to read every book published by Stephen King. I’m down to short story collections and a few of his less (ahem) popular novels.
Nightmares and Dreamscapes isn’t King’s best short story collection. I think that award goes to You Like It Darker from last year. But any collection of stories by this generation’s master storyteller is still pretty great.
Stephen King must have felt he needed a challenge when he started this one. How about a horror novel with just one character handcuffed to a bed with the only way to move the story along is through inner dialogue. Oh, and let that character be a woman, and let that woman be sexually abused by her father as a child. Yep, that would be a challenge.
And, I guess he succeeded? Maybe? I’m torn over this one, because it feels offensive to me that a male author would attempt to put himself in the tortured mind of an abused woman.
On a quest to read the few Stephen King books I missed along the way. I forgot how great of a short story writer King is. Probably some of his novels should have been short stories! Gingerbread Girl and N were my favorites in this collection.
Another completion in my quest to read every Stephen King book. This one missed the mark for me. To execute the pretty good idea for this horror tale, King had to involve way too many characters — almost the entire town of Castle Rock. With so many characters, I had a hard time connecting with any of them. Any other author would get a two stars, but King gets a pass.
My journey to read all of Stephen King continues. Normally, I enjoy the supernatural aspects of King’s novels. In this case, I think the story would have been better without any of the other-world part. Rosie is an abused woman who digs deep and finds strength to leave and ultimately confront her abusive husband with the help of her new friends. Having to rely on the supernatural powers to ultimately defeat her beast of a husband felt like a let down.
This is a wonderful collection of short stories and novellas by our generation’s master storyteller. I enjoyed every piece, but particularly liked Rattlesnakes, a sequel of sorts to Cujo. It’s meditation on the persistent grief of losing a child masquerading as ghost story. I’ve read most of Stephen King’s shorter works. This newest one tops them all.
Continuing my quest to read every Stephen King novel … The Regulators was published on the same day as Desperation. Many of the same characters bedeviled by the same evil spirit Tak, but set in a parallel universe. The book covers of the two novels make up a single scene:
This book was nothing like I expected. Frankenstein (the scientist) is arrogant, self-absorbed, and makes incredibly bad decisions. The story itself is unbelievably far-fetched. There were times I wanted to throw my Kindle on the floor at the dumb-assedness of our unreliable protagonist.
Taken more broadly, it’s a cautionary tale about mankind’s continual push for scientific advancement, which feels more relevant today than ever.
My 14th Stephen King book in 2023 and his most recent. The setting was some unnamed city in the Northeast, close to Philly maybe, during the second year of COVID-19. A big theme here was the idiocy of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters. While I agree with King on these three groups, it felt very preachy in a horror novel. But, the story itself was good enough to look past this. In this one, there was no supernatural element at all, just the pure evil of two elderly professors preying on young “livestock” to prolong their own lives.
Continuing my quest to read the Stephen King books I missed along the way. This book flew by on my Kindle. Lots of supernatural fun mixed in with nostalgia for my late 1970s youth. I’m tempted now to watch the movie, which I somehow also missed.
I listened to this Richard Bachman book on audio. The story was OK. By the end, you felt sorry for Blaze, the thug who kidnaps a baby for money. Blaze led a hard life and physical abuse from his drunken father caused permanent brain damage, so he was “slow”, but kind hearted (unless you crossed one of his friends). He leads of life of small crime as an adult and hooks up with George, a fellow thief which is clearly a tip of the cap to Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck.
Working through the few books of Stephen King I haven’t read. This is a collection of his early stories. A few are dated, and a few are exceptional. There is a bleakness that pervades many of these stories. I hoped for a good outcome for the protagonist against all odds, but I was seldom rewarded. Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut and The Raft were my favorites.
Continuing my quest to read all of the books by Stephen King. I listened to this one to start and then finished it on Kindle. We follow the story of a lost nine-year-old through the forests of Maine and New Hampshire over the course of a week, using the innings of a baseball game as chapter markers. Trisha McFarland is a diehard Red Sox fan and closer Tom Gordon is her favorite player. You can tell King is going through a baseball phase as he uses this story to share is love for the game though this precocious little girl.
This is my sixth Stephen King book I’ve finished over the past month.
Lisey’s Story started slowly and was confusing at times with so many flashbacks (including flashbacks within flashbacks, which can’t be easy to pull off as a writer). While there is a supernatural element, the book centers on rebounding from grief, in this case, the death of Lisey’s husband.
An amazing collection of early short stories. My favorite — because of the utter difficulty I had in reading it — was The Ledge. The story involves the protagonist having to climb over a balcony railing on the 43rd floor of a luxury apartment building onto a 5″ ledge that he must use (without handholds) to climb around the entire building. Gusting winds and pecking pigeons make him stagger and sway, along with his antagonist who is there watching and taunting him. Mr. King tapped directly into my singular fear. I had to stop reading at different times and remind myself that it was fiction. I am sure my blood pressure was spiking. I tried to close my eyes a few times, but it’s awful hard to read with your eyes closed. What a storyteller!
