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madanxiety 's review for:
The Long Walk
by Stephen King, Richard Bachman
dark
tense
My first Stephen King read. What I liked, and why I chose to read it, was the interestingly simplistic premise--the mundanity of it. All these unremarkable American boys killing themselves on a nonsensical gamble to prove their manhood or something. It's kind of a hilarious presentation of men's folly in that way.
That said, I had hoped for a less conservative plot. That is, I wanted my expectations to be subverted, but instead the novel was very predictable and unexciting. This is probably mostly intentional; it makes the reader go through the same mind-numbing dissatisfaction as the walker. You think, "what was that all for?" but the novel was trying to tell you the entire time: absolutely nothing.
A contributing factor to the triteness of the novel was the decidedly White male lens. It was an already predictable plot told through the lens of the most valued and uplifted perspective in our society. To me, that's boring! The novel says something about masculinity and the spectacle of death/murder, but it fails to comment on race, which is a mistake for a novel set in an American police-state. There could've been something with the Hopi brothers--before they were even introduced, I thought an American novel with this premise ought to make reference to the trail of tears, if implicitly. Of course, forced displacement is very different than a willing gamble, but I wish the irony of that in the context of American history had been further explored. I hate when dystopian stories set in the near-future divorce themselves from history. But there was very little world-building at all in this novel, so the lack of historical context was part of the broader lack of any context.
All in all, the novel did hook me. It took a minute because I am so used to the HEAs of romance, but I wanted to see it through. Ultimately, though, the novel didn't wow me.
That said, I had hoped for a less conservative plot. That is, I wanted my expectations to be subverted, but instead the novel was very predictable and unexciting. This is probably mostly intentional; it makes the reader go through the same mind-numbing dissatisfaction as the walker. You think, "what was that all for?" but the novel was trying to tell you the entire time: absolutely nothing.
A contributing factor to the triteness of the novel was the decidedly White male lens. It was an already predictable plot told through the lens of the most valued and uplifted perspective in our society. To me, that's boring! The novel says something about masculinity and the spectacle of death/murder, but it fails to comment on race, which is a mistake for a novel set in an American police-state. There could've been something with the Hopi brothers--before they were even introduced, I thought an American novel with this premise ought to make reference to the trail of tears, if implicitly. Of course, forced displacement is very different than a willing gamble, but I wish the irony of that in the context of American history had been further explored. I hate when dystopian stories set in the near-future divorce themselves from history. But there was very little world-building at all in this novel, so the lack of historical context was part of the broader lack of any context.
All in all, the novel did hook me. It took a minute because I am so used to the HEAs of romance, but I wanted to see it through. Ultimately, though, the novel didn't wow me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror, Cursing, Death, Sexism, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Torture, Violence, Blood, Excrement, Vomit, Suicide attempt
Moderate: Sexual violence