Walking and Walking and Walking

When I was a young boy, my parents used to drag me away on nice family holidays to the Lake District and other places of that ilk and force me to walk: walk through forests, walk through fields (as long as there weren't cows in there, my Mum is terrified of them), walk up hills, walk on roads. I used to hate it, trudging along sulkily by myself either far in front or far behind the rest of my family. I vowed that if I ever grew to like walking I would have become an old loser and would kill myself immediately. When I started enjoying walking I was only about sixteen, so reasoned that I was probably not quite over the hill just yet, and put my cyanide capsule to one side.

At the moment, every time I take a step I feel as if it's my ten-thousandth in a row, and I imagine shooting pains and cramp enveloping my legs as I stagger onwards, my trainers flapping uselessly from my blister-ravaged feet. The reason for this is the mental torture (in a good way) of Stephen King's The Long Walk. I discovered it at the peak of my interest in The Hunger Games, when I was reading any article I could find on the subject, and came across The Long Walk in a piece about dystopian fiction. Interestingly, the parallel dystopian society in The Long Walk is almost completely ignored, with only tantalising glimpses into its opression beyond the fact that any government dissenters are quickly disposed of. The novel instead centres exclusively around the Long Walk itself, an annual walking competition in which a hundred volunteers stagger in a straight line down the USA. The rules are simple: you must stay above 4mph at all times; if you slow down for thirty seconds you are warned; you get three warnings, and next time you slow down you get a "ticket", or are shot in the head in the parlance of our times. The last man standing wins "the Prize", whatever he desires for the rest of his life.

The dystopia is used only as a sideshow, the main attraction being the endurance challenge of the competition, the mental battle that duels with the fatigue of constant walking to produce a hellish concoction. It's a fascinating story of how, when your life is on the line, a will to survive overtakes tiredness. You live on the road with these boys as one by one they go insane, suffer intense cramps, or simply drop dead after pushing their bodies to the max, and the intensity of the thing warps your mind. I've always thought of Stephen King as a bit of a pulp writer until now, but after The Long Walk I've come to appreciate what a truly great writer he is, and think I'll look into some of his other novels. I'm sure there are a lot of things he can teach me about horror. And as for the Long Walk, at the moment I feel like it's something I might want to have a little bash at, a twenty-four hour version, just to see if I can do it, to appreciate all the more the emotion of the novel. It reminds me of when I wanted to pretend to be homeless for a while and I've doen that, so maybe if I can set aside a weekend and a few days recovery, my own Long Walk may be in my future.