Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Running Man, by Richard Bachman/Stephen King

The Story: The year is 2025 and everything is kind of in shambles.  Ben Richards’ young daughter has come down with the flu and because they can’t afford to take her to the doctor, it is just getting worse and worse.  America is pretty much obsessed with reality TV that is taken up a notch- people can get severely hurt or die, but also have the chance to win money for their families at a time when jobs and money are scarce.  Ben decides that this is the way to go for his family so he goes and applies to be part of the Games.

The Game he is chosen for is called Running Man.  It is the most popular show and has the highest payout, however no one has ever survived.  The object is this:  the player is let loose in America. He gets a 12 hour head start, then he is fair game.  There are a group of men looking for him and Americans are encouraged to call in any spotting of the player.  Any confirmed spotting wins 100 dollars and any spotting that leads to a kill is worth 1,000.  The player wins 100 dollars an hour that he stays alive and if he makes it 30 days, he gets a billion dollars.  He can go anywhere in the world but has to send in two tapes every day that the Network can show on TV and can potentially give out clues to where the player is.

Ben is just this cocky, kinda smart guy and he goes into this with his goal being to get enough money for his wife and daughter to be comfortable and for his daughter to be able to go to the hospital.  He is given advice early on not to just hole up, but to run, run, run.  This is advice that he takes to heart and makes the suspense and adventure happening here totally crazy.

What I Thought: I don’t know what took me so long to read this.  I have this book that has four of Stephen King’s stories that were originally published as Richard Bachman.  The other stories I’ve read a handful of times, but I’d always just avoided Running Man.  In an attempt to clear out my basket of books I haven’t read, I decided to read this one last night. I’m glad I finally gave it a go.

What I’ve always thought was funny about The Long Walk and what I thought was funny about this one too is how ahead-of-his-time Stephen King was on calling the rise of reality TV.  Shows like Survivor and Biggest Loser and all that stuff didn’t exist at all when these stories were written, but Stephen King seemed to know that they were coming.  Weird.

Anyway, I thought that this was just alright.  Not Stephen King’s finest hour, and not his worst.  Just somewhere in the middle.  I remember reading that he wrote this full story in 72 hours though.  That in and of itself is pretty impressive.

The part I liked the most was just the bleak look at the future that was presented.  It’s funny, as we’re getting closer to 2025 to see how far off he was about some things (flying cars?  Probably  not going to happen in the next 15 years) and how close he was on others (severe, horrible pollution).  I also really got into Ben Richards’ character and although I felt like everything was stacked against him, I wanted him so badly to beat the system.  All of the stuff I liked a lot was in the first half.

The second half, for me, was where everything got kind of messy and sub-par.  It turned into a full tilt action movie pretty much and I just wasn’t impressed.  It wasn’t awful, but it just didn’t pack a punch like the first half did.  After a few pages of car chases and shooting and yadda yadda, I found myself zoning out… and then it went on for 50 more pages.  I wasn’t impressed.  I did like how it ended and thought that it was fitting, but getting there was just kind of shaky.

Conclusion: Here is really what I wanted to say my whole review: If you liked The Hunger Games, check this out.  It’s only a couple hundred pages and I know you can fit it in before Mockingjay comes out in August.  It’s such a similar story and setting that it is kind of shocking.  It is just the more “grown up” version.