Tonight on the GeekNights Book Club, we discuss Stephen King's Richard Bachman's The Running Man (1982). In 2025, the world's economy is in shambles, and America has become a totalitarian dystopia. The better-known Arnold movie is loosely based on it, though thematically it was spot-on. The 2025 Edgar Wright film will be much closer to the original.
In the news, No Kings Day is October 18th: find the march nearest you! The next GeekNights book club book will be I Who Have Never Known Men.
I requested this book from the library as soon as I saw the Edgar Wright trailer.
I don’t see how anyone could avoid the Stephen King connection, or perhaps someone copying his style. As soon as the protagonist started heading to Boston, I asked myself, “Is he going to make it to Maine?”. Nailed it, Derry in fact. There was also a turn of phrase I had never heard of that I googled while reading, “like a hen needs a flag”, that one blogger summarized as “[T]he best we can guess at is that the expression originated with Stephen King in 1980.”
King also claims that the Bachman persona (wikipedia) …
… was also an attempt to make sense of his career and try to answer the question of whether his success was due to talent or luck. He says he deliberately released the Bachman novels with as little marketing presence as possible and did his best to “load the dice against” Bachman. King concludes that he has yet to find an answer to the “talent versus luck” question, as he felt he was outed as Bachman too early to know. The Bachman book Thinner (1984) sold 28,000 copies during its initial run—and then ten times as many when it was revealed that Bachman was, in fact, King.
I haven’t seen the Wright movie yet. I didn’t even know it was in theaters until it was leaving. I guess I’ll catch it streaming. I am guessing the exact book ending isn’t present, so I wonder what they went with.
They get very close to the book ending. They wink at the audience to suggest that they know how the book ended. Then they do something different.
