Obscenely Flapping - The Long Walk by Stephen King

Sometimes, Stephen King frustrates me. I always look forward to reading his work, yet am seriously disappointed when he doesn't meet my expectations. That’s to be expected given his position in American culture. He is the Master of the Macabre. While he’s earned that title through stories that resonate as much as they thrill, his ideas and intent are sometimes sabotaged by B-movie dialogue, odd similes and metaphors, and hazy writing. Though I haven’t read half of his prodigious output (over fifty books in thirty-five years), some of it, like ’Salem’s Lot, Misery, and On Writing, I love from a reader’s and writer’s standpoint. In those works, I gladly went wherever King wanted without questioning how we got there. Other books, such as The Shining and The Stand, are highly enjoyable, but arbitrary plot devices (Jack Torrance forgets about the boiler, the Hand of God decimates Randall Flagg’s followers) lessen the impact of the material. What frustrates me most is King seems to know better. His columns in Entertainment Weekly (his hilarious Shoe-Dini article last year had me in tears), his interviews, and his political opinions, point to an intelligent man with a realistic grasp on his perceptions. He knows how to articulate, damn it. With The Long Walk, however, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King loses his articulation and yes, poise, by squandering a great concept in favor of cheese.

            In an alternate-history America, World War II lasts until the 1950s. Paranoid citizens adopt a totalitarian government run by “The Major.” One hundred teenage boys participate in The Long Walk, a contest of who can walk the farthest without stopping. If a contestant’s foot speed falls below four-miles per hour, he is warned by soldiers riding in halftracks beside the walkers. A contestant is shot after three warnings, or as the characters put it, “buys their ticket.” Ray Garraty is seventeen, might be gay, has a girlfriend he loves, a mother he may want to fuck (Freud, you asshole), and a “Squadded” father. Squadding is the arrest of political dissidents. It's a hushed-up practice, yet nevertheless public knowledge. Garraty hasn’t seen his father since he was a boy. He signs up for The Long Walk seemingly oblivious to its fatal consequences.

            Walking with Garraty are a host of token characters: McVries, the wise, sarcastic best friend, Bartkovich, the jerk, Stebbins, the mysterious one who never gets tired, Scramm, the good ol’boy, Olson, the bullshitter. Though colorful, we’re never allowed into their psyches. As they provide Garraty with their obligatory backstories, their inane dialogue (here’s the norm: “I’ll tell you where you can stick [insert any noun]. It’s long and dark and the sun never shines there.”), spouted during the most implausible moments, erases their credibility. Even Garraty is two-dimensional. Emotionally unstable, wishy-washy teenage boys are realistic. Garraty, however, never has a stance on anything. Hell, it’s never even stated why he signs up for The Long Walk. McVries says “they all want to die,” but that allows King to easily paint the contestants with a dictatorship-is-bad, look-what-it-does-to-the-human-spirit brush. The antagonist, always one of the highlights of King’s work, is equally disappointing. The Major makes fleeting appearances in his ceremonial jeep to shout platitudes, but his character lacks presence. The reader only knows his physicality, never what makes him tick. He does not inspire real fear or dread.

            You’d think a grueling, sick contest in a totalitarian America would come with political themes. Yet, all we have here are teenage boys making weightless insults and waxing about breasts and death. It is especially grating when King mentions historical aspects of his alternate America, like the storming of a Santiago Nazi nuclear bunker in ’53, and does not elaborate. Elaboration is needed since King begins every chapter with a quote from the present day. He quotes You Bet Your Life, The Gong Show, The New Price Is Right, and it made me wonder: Would these shows exist in an alternate reality? Same goes for King’s music references. If U.S. dictatorship Squads its citizens, why does it put up with counterculture music?

            Equally frustrating is King’s writing. A third person narrator interrupts the boys’ conversations (yes, after walking over two hundred miles, they still have conversations as if hanging around a locker room) with beautiful, haunting depictions of nature and crowds. At times, I was wowed. Then, I’d cringe at such similes as, “They stood silhouetted against the darkening sky like Indians.” Why Indians? If he’s going for darker skins, why not Italians? If they’re silhouettes anyway, why not Norwegians? Objects also “obscenely flap.” This phrase reads like the novel’s key words, mentioned at least three times over the course of the walk. Things are always “obscenely flapping.” One character “[rips another] to his feet.” How one can rip to something? I haven’t had much luck.

            When King publishes under Bachman, it’s as if he digs up a manuscript he wrote in his early twenties, fixes spelling and grammar errors, and says, “Good to go.” That sounds harsh, but I thought the same when I read the first Bachman book, The Rage, and found it more dismal and derivative than The Long Walk. That book was written by a young man angry at school, authority, and girls, and it reads like it. While not as bad as that novella, The Long Walk certainly treads that territory (pardon the pun). While it provides is an interesting concept, easy readability (I read it in 3 days), occasional humor, and King’s trademark Maine setting, it lacks is fully developed themes and characters that make the ending, which is supremely creepy in its ambiguity and possible connection to The Stand, matter to readers. C