Recommendations of the Editorial team
Stephen King – the ranking
10. The Long Walk (1979, German “Death March”, as Richard Bachman) ★★★★ ½
The first book written by King, began in 1966, is also one of the best of his “Bachman novels”. In a dictatorial future society in America, teenagers can “take part in the long march”. Anyone who holds as the longest gets everything they want until the end of their lives.
The others: are shot, by the motorized soldiers accompanying them on the roadside. If the kids do not die before exhaustion. Because breaks are not allowed and a minimum running speed is specified. Stool, eat, even sleep. Everything when walking.
The attraction is not only in the description of hostility and alliances within the youthful competition participants. Or how to master the challenge of having to do everything in permanent movement. King succeeds some of his most beautiful landscape descriptions. An almost meditative calm characterizes it over long distances. In other places, King, in turn, demonstrates how bad rain and sun can be when it comes to survival.
The criticism Stephen Kings Device almost in the background. How incentives lead young people into the catastrophe, but also. How blind we – here embodied by the fatherly “major” – to impress each other to each other. The “death march” film adaptation of “The Long Walk”, cinema release September 2025 addresses current political conflicts and conflicts of identity in the middle of fluid perceptions of self-empowering: Who am I-and what does the state have to do with it?