Stephen King: The Long Walk

One hundred teenage boys participate in a walking race. Only one survives to the finish line. The winner gets everything he wants for the rest of his life.

I had been waiting for decades for Stephen King's The Long Walk (affiliate link) to be made into a movie. This book is one of my favorites in King's work. It had been a long time since I last read it.

After seeing the movie, I started to be bothered by the fact that I remembered so little about the plot of the book. I immediately had to rush online to get it for my computer, since the library doesn't have it (or so I thought). I only succeeded from a third source. Libgen required a login, there was no version to borrow from the Internet Archive. I first downloaded the mobi from Anna's Archive, but Adobe Digital Editions doesn't support it. So I had to download the epub version, and that's when it started working.

It was only afterwards that I discovered that a new Finnish edition/version of The Long March had been published. When I last checked, there wasn't one yet. The book wasn't in the library at all then, but it is now. And it would have been on the shelf when I went to the library just the day before. Damn.

 

This time I paid the most attention to the differences between the book and the movie, and there are plenty of them. The biggest one, of course, is the completely changed ending. As well as the changed personalities and motivations of the characters. Many characters from the book are not in the movie at all, and these characteristics of the deleted characters have been given to other characters. One example of this is Stebbins, who has been given the characteristics of the deleted Scramm: good fitness/muscularity and disease.

Racism. Homophobia. Misogyny. The death of a dog. All of this can be found in The Long Walk.

Even when threatened with death, teenage boys have sex on their minds. And surely that's worth dying for?

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