‘It’s nonetheless so related’: The energy of Stephen King’s first – and most annoying

Lawrence factors out how vital it was to remain true to the spirit of a novel that’s typically labelled as King’s most pessimistic, with its grim violence and chilling despair maybe explaining why its journey to the display has been so (aptly) arduous. First George A Romero after which Frank Darabont owned the rights to the e-book however didn’t get it over the end line, regardless of having earlier with King within the type of Creepshow and The Dark Half, in Romero’s case, and The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Mist, in Darabont’s. Lawrence succeeded the place they failed, and did so with out sanitising the harrowing story to make it extra palatable for mainstream audiences. “You need to feel the miles and the time [passing], and feel the degradation – emotionally, psychologically, physically,” he insists. “I wasn’t going to dilute that and make the studio feel super-comfy with it.”

“There’s something relentlessly pessimistic about the nature of the story – lots of young people being killed,” agrees freelance movie programmer and author Michael Blyth, who was a senior programmer on the British Film Institute when it mounted a month-long retrospective of King’s movies again in 2015. “But at the same time, there’s a lot of kindness in there. The boys don’t turn on each other. They’re quite supportive. There’s something about friendship and brotherhood that’s very present in the book.”

Simon Brown concurs. An impartial scholar and member of the horror research analysis group at Northumbria University who has taught on King, he’s the writer of Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television. “The Long Walk is so bleak and miserable,” he chuckles. “The only other King book that approaches this level of bleakness is Pet Sematary, which is a dialogue on death. But King is not a pessimist. He believes in the power of common decency, and most of his books end with whatever the monster is being defeated. The Long Walk is evidently a template for what would become a Stephen King book: you take a bunch of characters, put them into a situation, and see what they do. You can see that in The Stand, Under the Dome, The Mist… His books aren’t about the monsters, they’re about the people who meet the monsters. Here, it’s not about the walk, it’s about the people on the walk. And they’re all ordinary people.”

The beginning (and demise) of Richard Bachman

The Long Walk was the second of 5 novels that King launched underneath the pseudonym of Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1984. The bestselling writer invented a nom de plume to “turn the heat down a little bit”, as his debut novel, Carrie, had been shortly adopted onto cabinets by bestsellers Salem’s Lot, The Shining and The Stand. His publishers, Doubleday and Company, Inc, favored to trumpet that there have been “over 40 million King books in print”, however King discovered himself questioning if his success was all the way down to expertise, his superstar or simply plain luck. It was a query that he felt the Bachman experiment would possibly reply. “It is depressing to think it was all – or even mostly – an accident,” he wrote in his introduction to The Bachman Books, a compendium revealed in 1985. “So maybe you try to find out if you could do it again. Or in my case, if Bachman could do it again.”