Once, long ago, in the mid-1960s, a shortsighted college freshman began writing a novel about a totalitarian near-future USA. The teenager dreamed of becoming a bestselling author, and this tale of a death-or-glory contest was his first step on the road and set the direction of travel. Six decades later, the landscape’s very different. The poor boy from Maine grew up to be one of the world’s most popular writers, while his depiction of a fascistic, trigger-happy American heartland doesn’t look quite so far-fetched any more. The kid’s dreams all came true. Unfortunately, some of his nightmares did, too.
The backstory to The Long Walk could almost be a Stephen King tale itself, although this might require the author to be literally haunted by his old college manuscript, as opposed to simply cashing the cheque as the book is made over as a Hollywood motion picture. It’s actually the third King adaptation we’ve seen this year, arriving just after Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey and Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, and a month ahead of Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, but it stands on its own merits and is well worth checking out.
