The Running Man by Richard Bachman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This chronological King journey is not a sprint; it's more of a marathon. So I'm still at the 80s and one book before the Gunslinger, which kicked off the Dark Tower series. The Running Man is a decent book, a greatly paced one, a dystopian sci-fi novel, over 20 years before the Hunger Games series. It has a kinship with a previous Bachman novel, the Long Walk, the only exception being that the latter would never be made into a movie with Arnie starring in it. This book is a meditation on television, social inequality, and on people not giving a shit about what's going on outside their yard. It's not one of King's greats but definitely not one of his worst. The story of Ben Richards is dark, intriguing and captivating, and as every good dystopian sci-fi novel, it is an imaginative commentary on the author's present: 35 years later, it's still an entertaining, amazingly relevant read.
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