{"id":203,"date":"2010-09-30T23:00:07","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T23:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookblog.salticid.com\/?p=203"},"modified":"2017-06-20T22:52:28","modified_gmt":"2017-06-20T22:52:28","slug":"the-long-walk-stephen-king-writing-as-richard-bachman-1979","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2010\/09\/the-long-walk-stephen-king-writing-as-richard-bachman-1979\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>The Long Walk<\/i> &#8211; Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman, 1979"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/bookblog.salticid.com\/?p=200\"><em>The Hunger Games<\/em><\/a> led me to re-read this early King novel with a very similar plot: adolescents (all boys of course, given the time period) compete to last longest in a death march, with the winner getting anything he asks for during the rest of his life. But at least here the kids aren&#8217;t trying to off each other &#8211; it&#8217;s the military who sets the rules and enforces them. Although the setup is given some cursory rationale (&#8220;the Major,&#8221; a shadowy figure who inspires awe and hatred, has taken over the government after riots wrecked the US), and there&#8217;s even a paragraph to address why on earth these kids would volunteer (poverty, propaganda, the risk of public shame), it&#8217;s got the classic horror feel of a situation created without much purpose beyond freaking out the reader.<\/p>\n<p>In an essay on King, Algis Budrys criticized him for inaccuracies in most of his work (like the Ford Pinto in Cujo breaking down because of a weakness that engine didn&#8217;t have) and concluded: &#8220;He seems to have the feeling&#8230; that the reader demands circumstantial detail, and supplies the detail, but doesn&#8217;t bother to research the detail.&#8221;\u00a0 Some of the specifics felt off in this too, like the way the highways ramps gather thick crowds of spectators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Hunger Games led me to re-read this early King novel with a very similar plot: adolescents (all boys of course, given the time period) compete to last longest in a death march, with the winner getting anything he asks for during the rest of his life. But at least here the kids aren&#8217;t trying [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}