The Running Man

I am going to start right away by saying that I did not really like The Running Man that much.  However, I'm glad that I read it, because I think that you can see a number of different themes that SK was confronting around this time and some that would become important in his later works.

Things that I didn't like:

1) The countdown.  Especially because if you think about it, nothing actually counts down in this story, not even the explosion at the end. 

2) The protagonist.  Maybe this just felt hackneyed because I had just read Cujo, where the characters are fleshed out (okay, maybe too much so).  But this guy just seemed kind of like a jerk for no reason.  Now, I realize that he was living in a society that gave him reasons to be angry, but he seemed less angry at those causes and more just generally angry.  That didn't appeal to me.  There was something about the 'as a man, I need to go earn my family money' idea that was too simplistic for me.

3) The future.  I felt like the future in this story was somewhat vague and not all that sketched out.  Basically, everything, everywhere is a disaster, unless you are rich (which most people are not).  Everyone else is dying of awful diseases or appearing on fatal game shows.

Now, some people might say that SK was prescient in predicting the obsession that we have now with reality shows, and I will give you that.  But he already did that in The Long Walk (which is kind of like The Running Man with a slightly different cast and set of rules).  And he's often prescient, which is probably part of why he is considered to be a masterful writer and observer of society.  

Perhaps part of why this novel didn't work so well for me is that stories set in the near future rarely age well. The Running Man supposedly takes place in 2025, so not all that far away, but everything has turned into chaos.  We hear about this in little bits, like France is under martial law, but we don't know why.  Also, would it really be likely that everywhere would fall apart?  I don't know.  Most importantly, people are restricted in their use of information and access to it.  That part seemed kind of strange now, considering how much information is currently at our fingertips and how that has changed our society--I realize that this is an unfair way of evaluating a book, but I just couldn't get my head around the fact that there seemed to be very few technological developments (FreeVee was basically cable, but with only one channel and mandated in everyone's homes, and I think the cars could kind of float or something) but pretty much everything else was the same.  It didn't feel like a coherent world vision of the future, like you might find in Margaret Atwood, for instance.  The Long Walk was better in my view, perhaps because it didn't need to describe the whole society in detail, so it provided fewer chances for the reader to question the coherence of the future being presented.

Some things that will come back later:

1) Sewers are icky.  There is a scene where the protagonist escapes through the sewers and I was suddenly reminded of scenes from IT.

2) They've after you!  Of course, we have already seen this in Firestarter, among others, but what struck me about this iteration was the fact that the protagonist constantly thought that the Hunters were following him and needed to plan his mistake.  This reminded me very much of Father Callahan's experience as recounted in The Wolves of Calla, which is the fifth Dark Tower book, so we have a ways to go.  The way in which SK described the gradual realization that the people outside were not simply bystanders but actual threats is very similar to how Father Callahan figured out that the 'low men' were after him and went on the run.  There is a pretty big gap in terms of time for this idea and I wonder if it will appear in other books as well.  None leaps to mind in this case.

Speaking of chronology, there is also a question of which order SK was writing these things.  I don't know that it was in publication order; in fact, that seems unlikely.  There were some common themes between this one and Cujo, the most notable of which was the fact that the father was ultimately helpless to aid his child, despite his best intentions (and in this case, the mother of his child).  The reason that this seems particularly pertinent is that the next book is The Gunslinger, which was one that SK worked on for a very long time, dating back to 1970 in fact.  Yet it also has some common themes with this and other contemporaneous works (running, for instance).  Look for a new post soon, I suspect that The Gunslinger will go quickly.