The Running Man

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This article is about the novel. For the film, see The Running Man (film). For other uses, see The Running Man (disambiguation).
The Running Man  

First edition cover
Author Richard Bachman
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction novel
Publisher Signet Books
Publication date May 1982
Media type print (paperback)
Pages 214
ISBN 0451197968
Preceded by Roadwork
Followed by Thinner

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 theme of the book resembles that of another of King's books written as Bachman, The Long Walk. Both novels appear in The Bachman Books.

The story follows protagonist Ben Richards, an unemployed resident of the Co-Op City neighborhood in the fictional Harding City. He and his wife, Sheila, are desperate to earn money to pay for the medical treatment for their baby daughter Cathy, who has been stricken with influenza. In a final attempt for money, Richards applies to be a game show contestant on The Network, a government-mandated television station that airs game shows in which contestants attempt life-threatening stunts. He is eventually accepted to be on "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, Jim Brown, and Richard Dawson.[1] The film was later made into a video game released on several different game consoles.[2]

Contents

[edit] Background

[edit] About the author

Stephen King was born in the U.S. State of Maine in 1947.[3] After attending Lisbon Falls High School in Lisbon Falls, Maine, he went on to attend University of Maine at Orono, where he began to write for the school's newspaper The Maine Campus.[3] King graduated from the university in 1970, and married his wife, Tabitha King, one year later in 1971.[3]

Soon after this, King began to write novels. It was in 1973, while King was a teacher at Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine, when his first novel, Carrie, was accepted by a publisher. Carrie was released in 1974.[3] Since his first published work, Stephen King has sold an estimated 300–350 million copies of his books. King is best known for his work in horror fiction, in which he demonstrates a thorough knowledge of the genre's history. Many of his stories have been adapted for other media, including films, television programs and comic books.[4]

[edit] Richard Bachman

The Running Man is part of Stephen King's The Bachman Books, a series of books written by King between the years of 1977 and 1982 that were written 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.[5] 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.[6] King later based one of his works, The Dark Half, off of the revealing of his pseudonym.[7]

[edit] 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 normally writing a novel would normally take approximately three months to complete at the pace).[8] 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 or writing."[9]

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."[10]

[edit] 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 has been nearly destroyed, and America has become a totalitarian dystopia. Richards, poor and jobless, needs money to get medicine for his gravely ill daughter Cathy, but is unable to find work because he had been blackballed.[11] As a last resort for money, Richards turns to the Games Federation[12], a government-mandated television station that runs violent game shows. Contestants win money by surviving challenges such as Treadmill to Bucks, where a person with a heart or respiratory condition runs on a treadmill.[13] After rigorous physical and mental testing, Richards is selected for The Running Man, which is the most popular, lucrative, and dangerous of all the games. [14]

The Games Federation explains to Richards that he will be deemed an enemy of the state and then released with a twelve hour head start before an elite group of "Hunters", Games Network-employed hitmen set out to kill him.[15] The contestant earns $100 per hour he remains alive, an additional $100 for each law enforcement officer or Hunter he kills, and one billion in "New Dollars" (worth more than traditional American dollars) if he should survive for 30 days.[16]

The runner is given $4,800 cash (a two-day advance on his winnings) before he leaves the studio.[17] 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 loses the prize money but the Hunters will continue their search until he is found, even if he lasts over thirty days. Despite the producer's claims to the contrary, as soon as the Network receives a videotaped message, the Hunters immediately know from the postmark the runner's approximate location. When the runner is caught, he is killed live on TV, if possible.

As the game begins, Richards obtains a disguise and false identification records, traveling through New York to Boston[18]. In Boston, he is tracked down by the Hunters and only manages to escape by setting off a fire in the basement of a YMCA that kills five police officers.[19] He narrowly escapes through a sewer pipe.[20] Next, he hides in the impoverished Boston ghetto, where he learns from a resident, Bradley Throckmorton, that the air is polluted on a massive scale, and that the poor live in appalling conditions, with high rates of asthma, emphysema, lung cancer, and bronchitis.[21] The Network serves as a propaganda machine to keep them docile so they will not revolt against the government.[22]

After Richards takes up the cause of informing the public of this massive pollution, Bradley decides to help Richards, providing him with transportation and a crucial re-mailing service that should allow him to evade the Hunters. Richards' next destination is Manchester, New Hampshire, where he disguises himself as an elderly, half-blind priest.[23] After terrifying nightmares, Richards goes to a safe house owned by a friend of Bradley's, in Portland, Maine.[24] However, he is identified and reported by the friend's mother, and is forced to escape. When police close in, Richards is wounded and hides in a partially-finished shopping center.[25]

The next morning, Richards realizes that he only has until noon to mail his tapes directly to the Network; there is no time to use the re-mailing service. He employs a little boy to mail for him, pretending to be a government agent, but soon finds the roads have been blocked. Commandeering a car, Richards takes a hostage and makes his way to an airport.[26] Richards holds a lengthy standoff at the airport and manages to bluff his way past the Hunters' leader and onto a plane by pretending he is carrying high-quality plastic explosives.[27]

On the plane, he takes both his previous hostage and the Hunter leader as prisoners aboard, and has the plane fly low over heavily populated areas. However, he is soon confronted by a Games Network producer, who calls his bluff. His cover blown, he is surprised when he is offered the job of lead Hunter. He decides to take it, but is then informed his wife and daughter were brutally murdered ten days earlier, even before Richards first appeared on the show.[28] With nothing left to lose, Richards overpowers the flight crew but is shot, suffering a mortal wound.[29] With his last strength, he overrides the plane's autopilot and sets the plane to fly right 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."[30]

[edit] Publication history

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "The Running Man (1987)". Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093894/. Retrieved on 2009-05-17. 
  2. ^ "The Running Man". Gamespot. http://www.gamespot.com/c64/action/runningmanthe/index.html. Retrieved on 2009-05-17. 
  3. ^ a b c d King, Tabitha; DeFilippo, Marsha. "About the Author". StephenKing.com. http://www.stephenking.com/the_author.html. Retrieved on 2009-05-20. 
  4. ^ "Archive: Horror master Stephen King seriously injured when struck by van". CNN. June 19, 1999. http://www.stephenkingshop.com/articles/seriouslyinjured.htm. Retrieved on 2009-05-20. 
  5. ^ King, 1999, front cover and inside page
  6. ^ King, 1996, 1
  7. ^ King, 1996, 3
  8. ^ King, 2002, 69
  9. ^ King, 1996, 3–4
  10. ^ King, 1996, 4
  11. ^ King, 1999, 1
  12. ^ King, 1999, 4
  13. ^ King, 1999, 2
  14. ^ King, 1999, 48
  15. ^ King, 1999, 73
  16. ^ King, 1999, 52
  17. ^ King, 1999, 54
  18. ^ King, 1999, 92
  19. ^ King, 1999, 112
  20. ^ King, 1999, 116
  21. ^ King, 1999, 131
  22. ^ King, 1999, 133
  23. ^ King, 1999, 152
  24. ^ King, 1999, 173
  25. ^ King, 1999, 190
  26. ^ King, 1999, 210
  27. ^ King, 1999, 253
  28. ^ King, 1999, 291
  29. ^ King, 1999, 302
  30. ^ King, 1999, 317

[edit] 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 


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