The Complete Stephen King Universe

by Stanley Wiater

  RAGE: TRIVIA

  • The original title for the novel was Getting It On.

  • Charlie’s father admires the crime novels of Richard Stark. That name is in fact a pseudonym of one of King’s favorite writers, Donald E. Westlake. King, of course, was using Bachman as a pseudonym to write Rage. Later in his career, King would write The Dark Half (1989), in which author Thad Beaumont uses “George Stark” as a pseudonym.

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  THE LONG WALK

  (1979)

  One of what have become known as the “early Bachman” books (Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man), The Long Walk is in fact the second-earliest novel-length work ever completed by Stephen King. Written in 1966 during his freshman year at the University of Maine in Orono, it was also one of his earliest attempts at what could be termed a work of science fiction rather than the horror novels and short stories on which his initial fame would rest. (Interestingly, King himself considered Carrie [1974], The Dead Zone [1979], and Firestarter [1980] to be more in line with what he would himself consider science fiction, as he felt these explorations of fantastic paranormal talents were but variations on classic science fiction themes.)

  Like the previous Bachman novel, Rage (1977), this entry also concentrates solely on young people as its primary characters—the action is seen only through the rudely awakened eyes of adolescents. The Long Walk takes place in an unspecified near future, in a bleak, ultraconservative Amerika (note the spelling for a then-popular representation of a fascist state), in which the country seems to have fought and lost a major energy crisis and the former democracy has been replaced by a police state.

  King never states precisely why or how these events have come to pass, but it is clearly a parallel world where joy and hope are two emotions that have long since been lost, along with most of our customary constitutional rights. Given similarities to the future world presented in The Running Man, we have posited for the purposes of this book that the future presented in both books is simply the dark future of the more contemporary world of the other Bachman novels. Thus, despite the difference in time periods, it is feasible to think they all take place in the same reality, at different times.

  To buoy the sagging spirits of the citizenry, the powers that be have created a pseudospectacle/sporting event called the Long Walk, a grueling 450-mile marathon trek down through the state of Maine.

  One hundred of the nation’s best young men (with one hundred alternates) are selected to enter this marathon through means of a national lottery. Whomever wins the race—there can be only one champion—will be rewarded with whatever his heart may desire for the rest of his life. His one great wish will come true, no matter what it may be.

  For reasons of which not even he is certain, sixteen-year-old Ray Garraty enters the contest. It is truly a case of winning a grand lottery for life—all he has to do to win is to complete the Long Walk. Unfortunately, there are no stops, no rest periods, no breaks of any sort. If you want to eat, you must do so while walking. If you must eliminate body waste, you have to do it while walking. And there’s a simple incentive to obey the rules once you begin. Those who do not keep up with the pack are given three separate warnings by the soldiers/observers accompanying the Walkers. After issuing the third warning, the soldiers are authorized to shoot to kill. No excuses. No exceptions. No mercy.

  Quite obviously a crude allegory about the military selective service carried to its extreme, King’s tale is always grimly compelling, if undeniably narrow, in its vision. Like The Running Man (1982), there are also several elements of The Long Walk that were likely inspired by television game shows. For instance, nearly every chapter opens with epigraphs from a host or creator of a classic television game show, including Jeopardy!, Let’s Make a Deal, and most tellingly, You Bet Your Life. Perhaps the book’s most explicit quote is attributed to Gong Show creator Chuck Barris at the opening of Chapter 4, in which he states that “The ultimate game show would be one where the losing contestant was killed,” which is the basic premise for both The Long Walk and The Running Man.

  The Long Walk is a game of winner-take-all, with a live audience of thousands of bystanders cheering from the sidelines in every town the Walkers pass through. These spectators are just as thrilled with the carnage that takes place as they are to cheer for their favorites to reach the finish line. In this future, King suggests that human nature has changed very little since the era of the ancient Romans when slaves were fed to the lions in the barbaric games played out in the coliseums. And even though Garraty survives the marathon, it’s hinted that he’s been driven insane by the experience, and thus is unable to enjoy his spoils. The cruel satire is that there is really no point to participating in the Long Walk—everyone loses in the end.

  As he did in Rage, King’s Bachman alter ego posits a much grimmer world than readers might expect from the average Stephen King novel. Except for the science fictional element of the lethal race, The Long Walk, like Rage, focuses on human beings under extreme pressure, detailing the horrors that can occur when people are pushed to their limits.

  The Long Walk, like the author’s other early works, is extremely linear in its focus, with no major subplots or digressions from its main narrative. Indeed, there is very little diversion from the hopeless situation of one hundred young men who have been selected to live and die on their fateful journey through Maine. The narrative radiates an unrelentingly angry and pessimistic worldview—as with Rage, the young author was writing during a period in his life when the literary cliché of “angry young writer” more than likely applied.

  Much of the novel’s extreme pessimism is a product of the era in which it was written, an era in which King and his contemporaries faced the grim prospect of being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. After one went off to fight in the jungle war, it was largely fate that dictated if a combatant would survive his term of service without being grievously wounded or killed. Just as many people of King’s generation believed that the Vietnam War—indeed, all wars—made no sense, nor served any meaningful purpose, this is also the case with the Long Walk itself. Ultimately, the government-run ordeal serves no purpose other than to insure that the young men involved in the process suffer horrible and violent deaths.

  We never learn exactly why the Long Walk is so important to the interests of this parallel Amerika. It’s never suggested that women become involved in the Long Walk, though one can safely assume that the futuristic premise was undertaken before the concept of women’s liberation in the military had become as well known as it is today.

  It is also hinted by the Walkers themselves that it’s very possible that no one truly survives the Walk to become a winner—that whoever survives the marathon is ultimately rewarded by being taken behind some building and shot in the head. In this Amerika, it just doesn’t matter if you support or oppose the conservative politics of the nation—either way, you are just so much target practice for the Establishment.

  King makes several veiled references to Shirley Jackson’s classic short story “The Lottery” (1948) in furthering a major point of The Long Walk, namely, that life is unfair. At the chilling climax of that story, an innocent person is unexpectedly sacrificed by a crowd of people simply because someone has to die—the outsider just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Jackson’s tale, that victim could be any one of us. No one denies it may not be fair, but it’s a system that works for those in control—for those who make the rules.

  In The Long Walk, King’s young victims—who sometimes cry out “It’s not fair!” before being shot—could be any innocent person chosen in the national lottery of the government’s selective service process. Forced to embark on a deadly journey of self-discovery, they hope against hope that they can somehow reach the end of their tour of duty—their long walk—without being shot by nameless, faceless enemies.

  The Long Walk fits well into the Stephen King Universe in that it reveals King’s long-standing d
istrust of the government (i.e., “the Establishment”), and of how little control most of us have over our own lives, even in a free society. No matter what Garraty’s comrades/competitors say or do to protest their impossible situation, after three warnings they are snuffed out by the soldiers obeying the faceless, nameless men who control the country. Three strikes, you’re out.

  Permanently.

  THE LONG WALK: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  RAY GARRATY WALKER: Number 47, he is only sixteen years old. Ray isn’t sure why he didn’t try to get out of participating, even though he had several chances to do so, and considering that his father had already been taken into custody for speaking up against the ghastly practice. At one point in the grisly marathon, he goes out of his way to embrace his mother and his girlfriend—the action very nearly costs him his life. Despite the odds, Garraty somehow completes the Long Walk, emerging as its sole winner (and survivor). Garraty’s whereabouts in the Stephen King Universe are unknown—it is strongly suggested that he has been driven insane by his experiences.

  JIM GARRATY: Ray’s father. When he dared to speak out against the inhumane Long Walk, he was taken away in the middle of the night by one of the government’s special Squads. His current whereabouts are unknown, but he is presumed dead.

  PETER McVRIES: Number 67 of the Walkers. One of the very last to fall, he gets to know Ray more intimately than any of the other Walkers. The two young men repeatedly save each other’s lives before all their warnings from the soldiers are used. Unfortunately, McVries receives his final “ticket” just as the end of the Long Walk is in sight.

  STEBBINS: Number 88 of the Walkers, he almost makes it to the very end of the Walk before being terminated. While possibly gripped by madness, Stebbins claims that the mysterious major, an important member of the oppressive governing body, is his father, and that he is one of his many illegitimate sons.

  THE MAJOR: The mysterious military man in charge of the Long Walk, he never appears in public without reflective sunglasses. There at the beginning of the Walk to tell the young men how proud he is of them, and to wish them all good luck, he then disappears for most of the remainder of the arduous contest. He may or may not be Stebbins’s father. Before the Squads took him away, Garraty’s father called the major “the rarest and most dangerous monster any nation can produce, a society supported sociopath.”

  THE DARK FIGURE: At the very end of the Long Walk, Garraty spies a figure who seems to be taunting him to keep on walking, to continue playing this ultimately fatal game, a nameless figure who may merely be the specter of death, but whose obscene actions suggest he may instead be a pawn, or maybe yet another incarnation of the dark man, Randall Flagg.

  THE LONG WALK: TRIVIA

  • The fact that the novel is dedicated to three of King’s teachers at the University of Maine (Jim Bishop, Burt Hatlen, and Ted Holmes) was a major clue in solving the mystery of the “Richard Bachman” pseudonym.

  • A character named Raymond (Ray) Garraty appears in Mike Noonan’s novel My Childhood Friend in Bag of Bones.

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  ROADWORK

  (1981)

  Certainly one of the bleakest, if not the bleakest, of the Richard Bachman books, the argument could be made that Roadwork is truly the darkest of all of Stephen King’s writings. Created at a time when the author was already enjoying considerable success as a bestselling author, the decidedly mainstream novel was written between ’Salem’s Lot (1975) and The Shining (1977), a depressing time in recent U.S. history. More to the point, it was also composed a year after the author’s mother had died painfully from cancer.

  King has had mixed feelings about this book over the years. In the introduction to the first omnibus edition of The Bachman Books in 1985, King states that “I suspect Roadwork is probably the worst of the lot simply because it tries to be good and to find some answers to the conundrum of human pain.” However, in his second, new introduction to a later edition of The Bachman Books, issued in 1996, King says that it is “my favorite of the early Bachman books.” Whether it is the best or the worst of the early Bachman titles is still open to debate. But like Rage, it remains one of the few books by King where not a hint of the supernatural nor the bizarre is to be found—the horrors of everyday life are more than enough to drive some of us mad, thank you very much.

  Roadwork tells of the imminent destruction of one man’s life.

  Barton George Dawes has spent all of his adult life living in the same average house, living on the same ordinary street, married to the same plain woman, working for an undistinguished company, the Blue Ribbon Laundry. All of that is about to radically change, as the state government decides to build a freeway extension in his small city that will not only pass right through the Laundry’s current location, but also through Dawes’s neighborhood. In subsequent months, everything that has held Dawes’s life together will be plowed under and covered over—in other words, methodically erased.

  But Barton Dawes isn’t going to let his world be taken from him without a fight, nor allow his life and livelihood to be stripped away for no ostensible reason. Thus, Dawes decides to do everything in his power to prevent the extension from being constructed. It doesn’t matter that the cards are stacked completely against him, that whatever he does to hinder the roadway, the extension will be built. Dawes single-mindedly pursues his goal, continuing even when he knows it’s hopeless. One example of this is when Dawes secretly firebombs the construction site, burning down the construction hut and damaging most of the heavy equipment. Turning on the evening news, he learns, to his utter disbelief, that the project is only going to be delayed by a few months at most. Dawes is no better than an ant foolishly trying to hold back a tidal wave.

  Roadwork starts on a shrill note of unwanted change, and doesn’t let up until Dawes’s entire world dissolves in a nerve-shattering wail of loss, mistrust, and pain. Subtitled A Novel of the First Energy Crisis, the majority of the plot occurs between November 20, 1973, and January 20, 1974, the time of the United States’ nationwide energy shortage due to the Middle East oil crisis. In that brief time span we witness Dawes’s rapid disintegration, as he first loses his livelihood, then his marriage, and finally his cherished home. Distraught, Dawes concludes that he has no other choice than to literally go out in a blaze of glory.

  Finally realizing he can’t permanently stop the freeway extension, he instead wires his empty home with high explosives, arms himself with high-powered weapons, and waits for the police—and the bulldozers—to arrive. His home—his little castle—is the last part of his special world where he can exist safely; if he can’t live there, he won’t live anywhere.

  Tellingly, King makes a point of never saying precisely what small city or state Barton Dawes does calls home (although one could make an educated guess that the story is set in the Midwest, probably lower Wisconsin). His point? That this could happen anywhere, to anyone.

  Never has King written a more earnestly mainstream novel. There are no fantasy or supernatural elements whatsoever in Roadwork to soften the blows, and yet it quickly becomes surreal in the sense that everything that befalls Dawes is like a personal solar eclipse. In short, everything just gets increasingly blacker and blacker until he finally becomes totally consumed by the darkness all around him. There are no joyful sequences to balance the unremitting series of small catastrophes that are steadily burying Dawes alive, one brick at a time. The nation, rocked by an energy crisis, is still licking its psychic wounds from the recent end of the Vietnam War, and no one seems to know what tomorrow may bring.

  There are no heroes to be found in Roadwork. Most of the characters introduced are unlikable, untrustworthy, or immoral. Oddly enough, one of the few relatively likable figures is a small time Mafia hood. In Roadwork, decent people die in senseless car accidents. Or they drop dead in supermarkets of a brain hemorrhage. Or they are fired from their jobs for no good reason. Most tellingly, Dawes’s only child, a boy named Charlie, expires from a brain tu
mor that his doctors couldn’t explain.

  Dawes himself feels he is dying of “soul-cancer” and so believes his criminal actions are his only way of striking back against the world that has so terribly wronged him. Yet King never allows us to do more than pity Barton Dawes, as we only see his dark, obsessive side. His obsession with maintaining his rapidly disappearing lifestyle cannot have any other outcome than to ultimately lead to his violent and meaningless death.

  King tells us time and again in Roadwork that life is not fair, that it doesn’t matter that you tried to live your life honestly—we are all going to die sooner or later, and when we do, it probably won’t be at the right time. And it probably won’t be very pleasant. Most frightening of all, it’s likely that no one else is going to notice your passing, or really care if you were ever here in the first place.

  ROADWORK: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  BARTON GEORGE DAWES: A middle-aged, low-level businessman who has worked all his adult life for a local laundry firm. He is married to Mary Dawes, who, even though she loves him, leaves him as his behavior becomes increasingly erratic. Desperate to stop the progress of a road extension that is slated to go through his home, he goes to a local used car salesman, who is actually a criminal, to purchase high explosives to blow away the impending invader. After first temporarily halting construction by firebombing a work site, Dawes uses the explosives he has purchased to wire up his home. After being cornered by the police in a violent shootout, Dawes puts himself out of his misery by setting off the dynamite.