The Running Man
1982
- horror fiction
- game shows
- television game shows
- fiction
- suspense
- science fiction
- dystopia
- bluffing
- surface-to-air missles
- crime scenes
The story
The Running Man is a dystopian thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, first published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982 as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the omnibus The Bachman Books. The novel is set in a dystopian United States during the year 2025, in which the nation's economy is in ruins and world violence is rising. The story follows protagonist Ben Richards as he participates in the reality show The Running Man in which contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are chased by the general public, who get a huge bounty if they kill him. The book has a total of 101 chapters, laid out in a "countdown" format. The first is titled "Minus 100 and Counting ..." with the numbers decreasing, ending with the last chapter called "Minus 000 and Counting" (or, in some versions, simply "000"). ---------- Also contained in: - [The Bachman Books][2] - [The Bachman Books](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL24796729W) [1]: https://stephenking.com/library/bachman_novel/running_man_the.html [2]: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL81591W/The_Bachman_Books_(Rage_The_Long_Walk_Roadwork_The_Running_Man)
What it’s like
Hard, sweaty and claustrophobic on the page, with the prose moving at a jittery, breathless clip that suits a book counting down to zero. The sensory world is a grimy, nearly-future America of smog-hazed cities, flickering televised spectacle, cramped safehouses and open city streets where every stranger might be a hunter, rendered in short punchy sentences and sharp, sardonic asides about media and money. Chapters are numbered down from 100 and each one tightens the screw, so reading feels like being chased: relentless, propulsive, hard to put down late at night. Tone is cynical and bleak with flashes of gallows humour, and the protagonist's arc is a desperate, angry man pushed toward a grim kind of clarity. Intensity is high: frequent, graphic violence and killing, brutal in its bluntness, with cruelty and fear as constant pressure, though no sexual content of note. It suits readers who want a lean, fast, socially pointed thriller and are not looking for anything gentle or cosy. For fans of relentless pursuit stories with a satirical edge about spectacle and the appetite for other people's suffering.
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