One Hundred Boys
Bring comfortable shoes, because today we are walking through the whole of Stephen King’s The Long Walk, one mile at a time. This is the full summary, and it spoils everything, so read the book first if you want to be surprised by anything.
So what is it? In a near future America run by the military, one hundred teenage boys start walking at the Maine border, and they cannot stop. Fall below four miles an hour three times, and the next time, the soldiers riding beside you shoot. The last boy alive wins the Prize, anything he wants for the rest of his life.
Our guide is Ray Garraty, sixteen years old, number forty-seven, the crowd’s favorite, Maine’s Own. King published it in nineteen seventy-nine under his pen name, Richard Bachman, and it is one of the bleakest things he has written.
Content note: graphic violence against teenagers, strong language, and some slurs in the dialogue, which I will not repeat.
Mile Zero
Mile zero is a parking lot near the Canadian border. Garraty’s mother has driven him through the dark, begging him to quit. The backout date was yesterday. He kisses her goodbye and meets a boy with a scar on his cheek, Peter McVries.
Around them sit Hank Olson, who jokes too much, Art Baker from the South, a skinny blond boy in purple pants named Stebbins who eats jelly sandwiches in a tree, and a sharp-nosed boy named Gary Barkovitch, who has a Plan.
The Major arrives in a jeep, wearing mirrored sunglasses. Each boy takes a number. Garraty is forty-seven. McVries is sixty-one. The Major says he gives his acknowledgments of valor to the losers. At nine o’clock his hand drops, and they walk. The longest a full group of Walkers has ever lasted is seven and three-quarter miles, and they pass it before eleven.
The rules, which the rule book’s hints repeat all day: conserve energy whenever possible, never wear sneakers, slow and easy does it. Four miles an hour, three warnings, and an hour of good walking wipes one warning away. Soldiers with carbines ride a halftrack beside them, and its radar dishes read every boy’s speed. No help. No stopping.
Day One
The first boy to die is Curley, at about mile nine. He has a charley horse, and he screams that it isn’t fair. Four carbines fire. Stebbins steps over the body and leaves a bloody footprint.
Ewing, who wore sneakers, goes down with blisters. Then the rain comes, and Zuck, who cut his knee in a fall, bleeds along the road, runs for it, and is shot over a hill.
Garraty kisses a girl with a sign and earns a warning. He walks with McVries, Olson, and Baker, and they argue about the Prize. Garraty gives Olson some cheese spread. A reporter appears with a microphone. Harkness writes everyone’s names in a notebook, because he wants to write a book.
At seven in the evening they reach Caribou, mile forty-four. Ninety-five boys are left.
The First Night
Night is where the Walk turns into a nightmare. On a steep hill a boy named Larson sits down and says he is only resting, and he is shot. Olson begs. Garraty dozes on his feet and dreams about his mother singing to him, and about a boyhood friend, and wakes up with a warning.
Stebbins tells them what he saw as a thirteen-year-old at the end of a Walk. Two boys left. One with purple feet. The winner crying into the dead boy’s shirt.
Barkovitch baits a boy named Rank until Rank swings at him and is shot. Baker tells him he isn’t a pest anymore, he is a murderer. McVries tells Garraty the moral of the story: walk or die.
By dawn on the second day, about mile eighty, twenty-seven boys are down. Garraty thinks they are a quarter of the way home.
Day Two
On the second morning Harkness gets a cramp and rides the edge of the guns for ten terrible minutes before he gets his foot back. He does not last the morning. Pearson counts his pennies. A married boy named Scramm tells Garraty about his pregnant wife, Cathy.
Gribble is shot after a girl at a roadside lets him kiss her. Percy, whose mother keeps showing up at crossroads, walks slowly into the woods and is shot. At mile ninety-nine, the first big crowd explodes around them, and Garraty starts laughing and cannot stop. McVries slaps him back to his feet and saves his life.
That afternoon, McVries tells how he got his scar. A girl named Priscilla cut him with a letter opener. A free watermelon, thrown by a man who is then arrested, makes everybody happy. Then hail starts, and a boy named Jensen runs in a panic and is shot.
Olson
By the second night, Olson has not spoken for hours. Garraty walks beside him, because Stebbins hinted that Olson knows a secret. Finally Olson says that God’s garden is full of weeds, that he does not want to die, and then he asks what time it is.
Then he walks toward the halftrack and grabs a rifle. The soldiers shoot him in the stomach on purpose, and he keeps getting up. McVries screams at him to get them. At the end Olson shouts that he did it wrong, and falls. Garraty sobs into his hair. The crowd cheers all of it.
Around midnight they step onto the turnpike at Oldtown under a four hundred gun salute. McVries leads forty boys in a raspberry. Garraty has to squat in front of thousands of people. Forty-six boys are left.
Day Three
On the third morning, Scramm has pneumonia. McVries and Garraty ask everyone left to promise the winner will take care of Cathy. Even Barkovitch says yes, with a sudden desperate speech about wanting friends. The two boys in matching leather jackets, Mike and Joe, turn out to be brothers from New Mexico, and Scramm comes from the same part of the country. Then Scramm and Mike turn toward the crowd, raise their middle fingers, and sit down together, talking.
That afternoon Garraty’s leg locks. He sits on the pavement, takes two warnings, then three, and watches a soldier raise a rifle. At the last second he sprints away, and for an hour he is two seconds from his ticket.
Joe, left alone, is shot before the afternoon is over. McVries admits he was only a backup, called ten hours before the start. Abraham bragged his way in with a silly essay. By night they walk into Augusta. Barkovitch begins to fall apart, and Garraty cruelly tells him that no one will miss him. Barkovitch tears at his own throat.
Freeport
On the fourth morning it is raining, and Garraty is walking through his home county. Stebbins needles him: Jan won’t be there, and he really wants his mother. Garraty throws away his ruined shoes and walks barefoot.
In Freeport, the fire siren is howling and a boy named Klingerman is screaming. Garraty sees Jan waving the blue scarf, and his mother in her black coat, and he runs at the crowd to touch them, with a television camera following him. McVries grabs him as the warnings roll out. He takes their hands, then has to leave, and Jan mouths go on.
It is the moment that changes him. For the first time, Garraty truly wants to win.
Why They Walk
Why would anyone sign up for this? The book keeps asking. Garraty says he does not know. Baker grew up on potato soup and collards, and thinks about the money. Scramm has wanted to walk since he was old enough to want anything. Abraham joked his way in with that essay, and then the joke would not stop.
McVries was only a backup, and still says he went in with his eyes open. Barkovitch walks to dance on graves. Pearson carries ninety-nine pennies, and moves one to the other pocket each time a boy dies.
And Stebbins says the answer is simple. We want to die, that is why we are doing it. McVries half believes him. Garraty refuses to.
The system is also built to trap them. Once your name is drawn on television, backing out means a testimonial dinner, a speech, and the Squads. Garraty’s father was taken by the Squads eleven years ago, for his politics.
The Last Day
The rest moves fast. Abraham gets everyone to promise there will be no help for anybody. Collie Parker climbs on the halftrack, shoots a soldier, and is shot dead.
On the fifth morning Stebbins reveals that the Major is his father. Seven boys cross into Massachusetts. Baker asks for a lead-lined coffin and is shot. McVries sits down, forty miles from Boston. And at Danvers, Stebbins collapses and dies, leaving Garraty alone on the road, with a dark figure beckoning from the rain.
I cover those last pages in detail in my ending explained video, with the movie’s different ending.
My Take
My take, and this is opinion. The Long Walk works because it will not let the violence become fun. The boys joke, they argue about girls and coffins, and then someone is gone, and nobody knows his name. That is the trap, for them and for us.
King’s own introduction in this edition calls Bachman a rainy-day sort of voice, and you can feel the rain. It is a slow book, and it repeats on purpose. If you saw the movie first, expect the book to be quieter in the middle and stranger at the end. If you want a fast plot, this isn’t it. If you want a book that follows an idea all the way to the end of the road, it is hard to beat.
You can find the full guide to The Long Walk on bookexplained.com. Who was the boy you remembered longest? Tell me below, and subscribe for the characters video next.
