The Running Man is a science fiction novel by Stephen King, first published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982 as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover 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 game show The Running Man in which contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are chased by "Hunters," employed to kill them.
The Running Man was made into a film with the same name, which was released five years after the book in 1987. The film starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as Richards, María Conchita Alonso, Jesse Ventura, Erland van Lidth, Jim Brown, and Richard Dawson.[1] The film was later made into a video game released on several different game consoles.[2]
Background
Richard Bachman
The Running Man is part of Stephen King's The Bachman Books, a series of books published by King between the years of 1977 and 1982 that were published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. The series included three other novels previously published under the Bachman name: Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), and finally The Running Man.[3] According to King in The Importance of Being Bachman, the introduction to The Bachman Books, Richard Bachman was created to be his long-term alias, not just a temporary writing identity. Although this was his goal, his actual name was eventually leaked to the media, which angered King.[4] King later based one of his works, The Dark Half, off the revealing of his pseudonym.[5]
Writing the book
According to King in his 2002 memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, The Running Man was written within a single week, compared to his normal 2,000 word, or ten page per day output (King comments that writing a novel would normally take approximately three months to complete at the pace).[6] King described The Running Man in The Importance of Being Bachman as "...a book written by a young man who was angry, energetic, and infuriated with the art and the craft of writing."[7]
Also in The Importance of Being Bachman, King describes the book's protagonist, Ben Richards, as "scrawny" and "pre-tubercular". King also added that Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played Ben Richards in the film adaptation of The Running Man, portrayed the character very differently than he wrote about him in the book, saying that Richards (in the book) was "...as far away from the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the movie as you can get."[8]
Plot
The book has a total of 101 chapters, laid out in a "countdown" format. The first is titled "Minus 100 and Counting..." and the ensuing ones are similar, with the numbers decreasing, until the last one, "Minus 000 and Counting" (or, in some versions, merely "000").
The story's protagonist, Ben Richards, is a citizen of Co-Op City in the year 2025. The world's economy is in a shambles and America has become a totalitarian dystopia. Richards is unable to find work, having been blackballed, and needs money to get medicine for his gravely ill daughter Cathy.[9] As a last resort, Richards turns to the Games Federation[10], a government-mandated television station that runs violent game shows. In one game, Treadmill to Bucks, a contestant with a heart or respiratory condition runs on a treadmill earning prize money for the duration of their run, often dying in the process.[11] After rigorous physical and mental testing, Richards meets with Dan Killian, a producer with the Games Network, and Bobby Thompson, host of The Running Man, the network's most popular, lucrative, and dangerous game. Richards has been selected to appear on this show.[12]
Richards is declared an enemy of the state and released with a 12-hour head start before an elite group of "Hunters", Games Network-employed hitmen set out to kill him.[13] The contestant earns $100 per hour he remains alive, an additional $100 for each law enforcement officer or Hunter he kills, and one billion "New Dollars" if he should survive for 30 days.[14] The record time for survival is eight days and five hours - a mark that Richards eventually surpasses.
The runner is given $4,800 cash (a two-day advance on his winnings) before he leaves the studio.[15] He can travel anywhere in the world, and each day he must videotape two messages and courier them to the TV show. Without a videotaped message, he will be held in default of his Games contract and will lose the prize money but will continue to be hunted indefinitely.
As the game begins, Richards obtains a disguise and false identification records, traveling through New York to Boston[16]. In Boston, he is tracked down by the Hunters and only manages to escape by setting off an explosion in the basement of a YMCA that kills five police officers.[17] He narrowly escapes through a sewer pipe.[18] Next, he hides in the impoverished Boston ghetto, and meets gang member Bradley Throckmorton and his family. From Bradley he learns that the air is polluted on a massive scale, that the poor are kept as a permanent underclass, and that the Games Network exists only as a propaganda machine to pacify and distract the public. Richards attempts to incorporate this information into his videotaped messages, but finds that the Network censors them and dubs over his voice with obscenities and threats against the public.
Bradley decides to help Richards, smuggling him past a government checkpoint to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he disguises himself as an elderly, half-blind priest.[19] In addition, Bradley provides Richards with remailing labels so that the Network will not be able to track Richards by the postmark on his videotapes. Richards spends a few days in Manchester, but dreams that Bradley has betrayed him after being tortured. He travels to a safe house owned by a friend of Bradley in Portland, Maine,[20] but is identified and reported by the owner's mother. As the police and the Hunters close in on the safe house, Richards is wounded, but manages to escape.
The next morning, after arranging to mail his tapes, Richards carjacks Amelia Williams, takes her as a hostage and makes his way to an airport.[21] Richards holds a lengthy standoff at the airport and manages to bluff his way past Evan McCone, the lead Hunter, onto a plane by pretending he is carrying high-quality plastic explosives.[22]
He takes both Amelia and McCone as prisoners, and has the plane fly low over heavily populated areas to avoid being shot down by a surface-to-air missile. However, he is soon confronted by Killian on a video call, who states that he knows Richards does not have any explosive as the plane's security system would have detected if he did. His cover blown, he is surprised when he is offered the job of lead Hunter. He is hesitant to take the job, worried that his family will become a target. Killian then informs him that his wife and daughter were brutally murdered ten days earlier, even before Richards first appeared on the show, and gives Richards some time to make his decision.[23] Richards falls asleep, and dreams of his murdered family and a gruesome crime scene. With nothing left to lose, Richards overpowers the flight crew and kills McCone but is shot and mortally wounded.[24] He allows Amelia to parachute to safety, and with his last strength, he overrides the plane's autopilot and flies the plane into the Games Building, home of The Network. The book ends with the plane crashing into the tower, and the description, "...and it rained fire twenty blocks away."[25]
Publication history
Notes
- ^ "The Running Man (1987)". Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/. Retrieved 2009-05-17.
- ^ "The Running Man". Gamespot. http://www.gamespot.com/c64/action/runningmanthe/index.html. Retrieved 2009-05-17.
- ^ King, 1999, front cover and inside page
- ^ King, 1996, 1
- ^ King, 1996, 3
- ^ King, 2002, 69
- ^ King, 1996, 3–4
- ^ King, 1996, 4
- ^ King, 1999, 1
- ^ King, 1999, 4
- ^ King, 1999, 2
- ^ King, 1999, 48
- ^ King, 1999, 73
- ^ King, 1999, 52
- ^ King, 1999, 54
- ^ King, 1999, 92
- ^ King, 1999, 112
- ^ King, 1999, 116
- ^ King, 1999, 152
- ^ King, 1999, 173
- ^ King, 1999, 210
- ^ King, 1999, 253
- ^ King, 1999, 291
- ^ King, 1999, 302
- ^ King, 1999, 317
References
- King, Stephen (written as Richard Bachman) (1999). The Running Man (Mass market paperback ed.). Signet Classic. pp. 336. ISBN 0451197968.
- King, Stephen (2002). On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (reprint ed.). Simon and Schuster. pp. 320. ISBN 0743455967.
- King, Stephen (1996), The Importance of Being Bachman (introduction to The Bachman Books), pp. 10
