The Long Walk
By: Stephen King as Richard Bachman / Narrated By: Kirby Heyborne
Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
Works even better as an audiobook!
I can’t tell you how many times I read The Long Walk before I gave it a go as an audiobook, and while I liked it plenty before, Kirby Heyborne’s narration makes it a wonder. King has a tendency of going off on whimsical riffs that can sometimes be annoying on the page, but when Heyborne delivers them with the delirious exhaustion that the Walkers are feeling, it proves masterful.
The story is about a Long Walk which is pretty vague. A hundred boys walk at 4 miles per hour or above until they’re ticketed. It all becomes clear as the novel progresses, becomes clear in a deliciously slow, deliciously brutal way.
Our hero is Ray Garraty, #47, “Maine’s Own”, a 16-year old boy who kinda sorta just decided he’d try The Walk out this year. After all, if you win, the prize is whatever you want for the rest of your life. And after his father was “squadded”, he rather feels he has something to prove. Along the way, he gets to know some of the other boys, some of them nice, some of them not so nice. He winds up making best friends with McVries, #61, who saves him from getting ticketed a couple of times. And there’s always the enigmatic Stebbins, #88, not part of the group, but not vicious either.
I listened to it all in a day, just as I read the book at one go because that’s how King’s genius comes to light. We start off as fresh listeners and soon come to be as tired, as delirious as the boys become; we start off as innocent as they are and soon come to be as inured to suffering and death as they become. It’s a gruesome tale—there will be only one winner, i.e. one survivor, and though we hope mightily it will be our hero, that means we might have to suffer the deaths of some pretty decent young men as The Walk progresses.
How King managed to evenly write the book, with mere tiredness becoming the norm then mere exhaustion, then pain throughout the entire body, then minds that hallucinate, then the breakdown of all that is normal and sane, is absolutely applaudable. I felt I’d suffered as much as any Walker by the end of the audiobook.
As I looked forward to rereading The Long Walk, I now look forward to listening to it again and again. Seems I just can’t get enough of terror, hopelessness, friendship, heartache…!
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