Tolog Review: The Long Walk

The Long Walk
by Stephen King
reviewed by Daisy Cushenberry

Every year one hundred boys from all across America voluntarily compete in “The Long Walk” in order to win the very desirable “Prize” of whatever he wants for the rest of his life. While the competition may seem simple and painless at first, Stephen King makes sure that his reader soon discovers it is exactly the opposite. The teenage “Walkers” are required to keep a pace of at least four miles per hour without ever stopping and there is no finish line, so the winner is the last man standing. If someone fails to keep this pace, he is warned. If he once again goes slower than four miles per hour, he receives a second warning. Each competitor gets three warnings, and if for a fourth time goes under the limit, he is given a “ticket,” or in other words, he is shot dead. However, if someone has gotten a warning and manages to walk above the limit for an entire hour, he then has a clean slate. As we walk through this wonderfully gruesome novel with King’s narration and the boys left to their own thoughts, it is incredibly interesting to watch the Walker’s minds change as their long walk become more challenging and more terrifying.

Main character Ray Garraty is just another sixteen-year-old boy with a pretty girlfriend waiting for him back home and not whole lot of advantages going for him. Multiple other boys are stronger and more determined than Garraty, but there is something about him that many boys don’t have: his mind set. Every time he begins to get tired or beings to give up, he always pushes himself to stay in the competition and walks faster, having little boosts of determination here and there. We meet three other main characters in the beginning of the novel, Peter McVries, Hank Olson, and Arthur Baker, and all four of them become just a little more than acquaintances, but not quite friends yet, before the Walk starts. As they get a few miles into the Walk though, they rely on each other as people to keep them from going completely crazy and share their thoughts with one another as death becomes something that may or may not be meeting with them soon. 

Garraty and McVries in particular tend to speak a lot about their ideas to one another, anything that comes across their mind, and even save each other from getting a ticket a few times. At one specific moment they discuss the very thought provoking idea that the Walk might actually be fake and McVries firmly believes that “there’s no winner, no Prize” and they just “take the last guy out behind a barn somewhere and shoot him too.” The boys’ growing bonds however are not exactly fantastic, and those bonds makes this already horrible event become even more torturous than it has to be. They must watch their friends die and cannot do anything about it but continue walking.

King does an absolutely sensational job at getting into his reader’s head and finding what scares them most. His descriptive and graphic writing makes this novel utterly vivid and intense, creating a whole new level of horror. This work is not like a ghost or zombie story, but it is one that takes you deep into your mind and shows you what insanely gory things can happen to a person if they push their body over its capable limits.