Books of 2024: Week 8 - The Running Man

Cody goes on the run with a Bachman book.

THE RUNNING MAN by Richard Bachman (a.k.a. Stephen King)

Published under the Richard Bachman pen name, The Running Man is another book that author Stephen King wrote while in his “angry young man” phase, which is reflected in other Bachman books like The Long Walk and especially Rage. (The Bachman book Roadwork, on the other hand, was written out of grief when King was mourning the death of his mother.) All four of the early Bachman books fit very well together, and they do all read like the voice of a writer who was someone largely, but not entirely, separate from King. It’s interesting to read these books and compare them to the books King had published under his own name. You could believe Bachman was someone else, if not for the King-isms that slip through... and the Maine connections. In The Running Man, we even get reference to Derry, the place that would end up becoming the setting of King’s epic It years later.

Like The Long Walk, The Running Man is set in a dark future where American citizens happily go along with games that result in the deaths of contestants. King was envisioning game shows being taken to extremes when writing this book, but at the same time he was also predicting the rise of reality shows. While Games Network programs like Swim the Crocodiles, How Hot Can You Take It, and Treadmill to Bucks (which forces people to walk on a treadmill while answering trivia questions and only accepts contestants who are chronic heart, liver, or lung patients) may be shot in a controlled studio, the one called The Running Man sends its contestants out into the world on their own, with the caveat that they have to shoot their own videos – which are like the confessional moments we see on so many reality shows – and send them in to the network.

Down-on-his-luck Ben Richards doesn’t watch the shows that are broadcast on the FreeVee to distract people from their poverty-stricken lives in the polluted hellhole that used to be America, but his young daughter is sick, he can’t get a good job, and his wife isn’t making enough money as a prostitute to buy the medicine their kid needs, so he’s driven to audition for a chance to be on one of Games Network’s horrific shows. He ends up being cast on The Running Man, where he’ll be set loose and given a twelve hour head start before the authorities and hitmen called The Hunters will be sent after him. He’ll win one hundred New Dollars for every hour he’s on the run. If he manages to stay alive for thirty days, he’ll win the grand prize of one billion New Dollars. But this is unlikely to happen, because the longest any Running Man has ever lasted is eight days.

It’s clear from the start that this is not going to go well, and King keeps the reader on the edge of their seat throughout by packing 100 chapters into the book’s 300 or so pages, each one counting down (Minus 100 and Counting, Minus 99 and Counting, etc.) Counting down, we can be sure, to heartache and disaster. Ben has a rough trip around New England while he’s on the run, and there’s danger lurking at the edge of every moment.

King has said that he writes an average of around 2000 words a day, but he knocked out The Running Man incredibly quickly; apparently he wrote this book in just one week. Knowing this, I’m left wondering if the book could have been better if King had spent more time with it. While it’s a good read, there is a feeling that it could have been improved with some polishing. That more could have been done with the concept and characters. The chapters hurtle toward the conclusion too quickly in the final third or so, there’s information we don’t get because Ben doesn’t get it, even though we had information he wasn’t privy to earlier in the book, and it feels like the idea of Games Network-employed Hunters could have been enhanced, because most of the trouble Ben has is with regular police officers. I enjoy The Running Man, at least up to a point, but it doesn’t quite reach its full potential.

Five years after The Running Man was published, the story got an awesome film adaptation with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead. It’s almost nothing like the source material, but it’s a lot of fun. Given that the movie is so different from the book, the door is still open for The Running Man to receive a more faithful adaptation. That would be interesting to see, especially if it ended up being directed by Edgar Wright, who was said to be working on just such a project a few years ago.