The Long Walk was the first novel Stephen King ever completed. It was not the first book published. That distinction belongs to Carrie , which originally appeared as a paperback in 1974. But nearly a decade before that, King was writing The Long Walk as a freshman at the University of Maine.

The youthfulness, and anger, of the literary work’s reaction to the then raging Vietnam War is still immediate to any modern eye. A story where virtually every named character is an adolescent boy who will soon be dead, including our point-of-view character Ray Garraty, is a simple and brutally efficient parable. It would also predict decades in advance the concept of “reality” TV competition, with viewers at home picking their favorite Walkers and Vegas bookies laying odds on them. It was a

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