Reading the Bachman books can be the literary equivalent of a migraine. Steeped in anger and impotent rage, featuring characters who can’t win no matter what they do, trapped in a classroom, trapped on a single stretch of Route 1, trapped in their houses as their minds fall apart, each story terminates in a bad part of town where all the streetlights are broken. So when you get to The Running Man you understand why Stephen King called it his favorite. With a main character on the run, who fights, who doesn’t give up, who doesn’t go insane, who never surrenders to despair, well, it feels like a tropical vacation compared to the other books.
Written in a 72-hour burst of inspiration during the bleak winter of 1972 while he was on Christmas break from his teaching job at Hampden Academy*, the roots of The Running Man go all the way back to March, 1969. In that month’s “Garbage Truck” column for The Maine Campus newspaper, King wrote about the “new trend in entertainment — the cheapie game show.” He introduced viewers to a whole host of new shows like The Brutality Game (40 Chicago Policemen vs. The Contestants, hosted by Mayor Richard Daley), The Divorce Game (hosted by Zsa Zsa Gabor, which ends with the losing couples stoning each other), and The Burial Game (hosted by Vincent Price). It was a funny, horrible over-the-top idea that informed both The Long Walk and The Running Man.
Set in the futuristic year of 2025, in an America where the totalitarian government keeps the population under control by dividing them into haves and have-nots, then getting them stoned on a steady diet of over-the-counter narcotics and endless violent Free-Vee reality shows, The Running Man focuses on 28 year old Ben Richards, a scrawny, economically strapped blue collar worker who signs up for the games and winds up making the cut for the most popular of them all, The Running Man, now in its sixth year. A real-life manhunt, the quarry tries to stay alive for 30 days while pursued by professional Hunters. Everyone in America joins in the fun, too, phoning in tips for a cash reward. The prize: one billion New Dollars. Number of winners: 0. Current survival record: 8 days, 5 hours.
Richards is out of work (insubordination and refusing to join a union got him blacklisted) and his wife supports them and their chronically ill 18 month old, which eats at his pride. Trying to Be a Man and A Good Father, he applies for a cattle call at the Games Federation building, hoping he’ll get anything at all — Treadmill To Bucks or Run For Your Guns or even Swim the Crocodiles. Anything to help buy the medicine their daughter needs. But Richards is a smart guy (when offered a prostitute the night before the games he asks for a novel and a bottle of bourbon instead) and he winds up making the cut for the biggest game of them all: The Running Man. Its executive producer Dan Killian, is a black man who takes a liking to what he describes as Richards’ “crude” nature, and he becomes the bad daddy of the book, patronizing Richards, offering him opportunities, nurturing him, trying to give him a chance to win, and ultimately betraying him. He is the face of The System that Richards wants to punch so badly.
The game begins and Richards runs, using all his guile, cunning, and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of the Hunters. Ultimately, he fails and winds up taking out Killian in a suicide run. This is a far cry from Rage, where Charlie was only ever capable of engineering his own destruction. In The Long Walk, a few characters tried to mount a resistance but were easily crushed, and the main character marched helplessly to his doom. In Roadwork, Dawes damaged a lot of property but ultimately killed himself. It’s not until The Running Man that a Bachman book features a main character who strikes back and kills some cops. A lot of cops. Kind of like all the cops.
Whereas “It’s not fair!” was the mantra of The Long Walk, “Somebody has to pay,” is this book’s snarl of rage. King wrote this one fast and close to the bone, filtering his life through a sci-fi lens: a father who can’t make ends meet, who can’t afford medicine for his sick kid, humiliated by the fact that his wife has to put bread on the table, who exists in an exhausted daze, constantly coughing from the polluted air. But the personal is always the political and this is also King’s most political book. Probably ever.
King grew up as a conservative Republican who slowly shifted his views to become a more center-left Democrat but, like a lot of kids who went to college in the late ‘60s, he was radicalized by what he saw on campus and in the streets. For a lot of historians, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention was the moment America began to divide into the liberal left and conservative right. The antiwar marches and protests outside the convention hall devolved into running battles with the police which were broadcast into every living room. Some Americans saw dirty longhairs trying to destroy one of our great cities. Other Americans saw what Dan Walker, future governor of Chicago, called “a police riot.” Read King’s “Garbage Truck” column written barely 6 months later about The Brutality Game, hosted by Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and you get an idea of what he saw.
King also protested the War while at the University of Maine, Orono, writing:
I’m walking along behind a big banner that reads END THE WAR, down past Boardman Hall...Someplace behind, a guy is beating a drum in slow time. It sounds like a body falling downstairs in stop action...Somebody grabs hold of the big banner and tries to pull it down...Somebody shouts, “When are you people going to grow up?” An egg is thrown. It splatters on the asphalt in a yellow smear. A kid in Biafra would have been glad to see it. He won’t. It was thrown at somebody carrying a banner advising an end to a war, and it landed in the street. Somebody calls out, “Peace, brothers!” Somebody belts me in the gut. It surprises me more than it hurts me...The girl that is walking beside me is hit by an egg, between the breasts. She says, “Someone has hit me with something.” Her voice is strange. Someone has thrown an egg at her. In Orono, Maine.
When King wrote The Running Man, President Richard Nixon had just been elected to his second term after running a shockingly cynical campaign (in an attempt to get the Black and Latino vote, Nixon authorized millions in funding for urban improvement projects, after his election he canceled almost all of them). Less than 2 years later Nixon would resign before he could be impeached as a result of the Watergate scandal. You can’t be Stephen King’s age and not have politics on your mind. However, the politics in King’s later, more polished books like The Dead Zone and Firestarter feel pretty off-the-shelf: presidents who want to start nuclear wars = bad; secret government agencies that torture people to death = bad. But The Running Man is all politics, all the time, and they crackle with an angry, personal charge.
Within 8 months of writing this book, King’s mother would be diagnosed with cancer. 4 months later, she’d be dead at 61. She was a woman who worked hard all her life, in laundries and care homes. King has talked about being deeply aware that his family was poor when he was growing up, and he eventually had to face a choice: the only ways out of poverty were the Army or college. When he told his Mom he wanted the Army she said, “You’ll break my heart.” That left college. King got a partial scholarship to Drew University in New Jersey, within a short hop of New York City, but without a full ride he couldn’t afford it.
His guidance counselor helped him figure out a way to attend the University of Maine, Orono, scraping together the money from a National Defense Education Act loan, a partial need-based scholarship, and an on-campus job. That still left a gap but King could fill it if he got a job over the summer and really socked his money away. Right before he graduated from Lisbon Falls High School in Spring, 1966, King got his first fulltime job, working at Worumbo Mills and Weaving in Lisbon Falls, mostly bagging fabric. It was hard, hot work, but it helped him patchwork together the last bit of money he needed to go to college.
There, King worked his campus job, he sold his blood, he wrote papers for other students and he kept writing, writing, writing. He knew the price of poverty. While he was there, King’s poetry teacher, Burton Hatlen, had the class read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice, his 1967 essay collection written while he was serving time in Folsom. Cleaver wrote:
The police department and the armed forces are the arms of the power structure, the muscle control and enforcement… The techniques of the enforcers are many: firing squads, gas chambers, electric chairs, torture chambers, the garrote, the guillotine, the frightened rope around your throat… The police do on the domestic level what the armed forces do on the international level: protect the way of life of those in power. The police patrol the city, cordon off communities, blockade neighborhoods, invade homes, search for that which is hidden. The armed forces patrol the world, invade countries and continents, cordon off nations, blockade islands and whole peoples; they will overrun villages, neighborhoods, enter homes, huts, caves, searching for that which is hidden. The policeman and the soldier will violate your person, smoke you out with various gases. Each will shoot you, beat your head and body with sticks and clubs, with rifle butts, run you through with bayonets, shoot holes in your flesh, kill you. They each have unlimited firepower. They will use all that is necessary to bring you to your knees… If you resist their sticks, they draw their guns. Eventually they will come in tanks, in jets, in ships. They will not rest until you surrender or are killed…
If The Girl From Harrison High felt like the template for Rage, Cleaver’s Soul on Ice feels like the template for The Running Man. The police in this book are what used to be called “Daley Cops” after the cops who ran riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The kind who crack skulls and ask questions later. The kind who view poor people as inhuman. The kind who protect the interests of the rich. And Richards gleefully kills a lot of them. Later, he comes across a Black gang member named Bradley Throckmorton who greets him with a switchblade and “If you’re heeled, drop it down.” When he realizes who Richards is, Bradley drops his act. It turns out that he and his gang are revolutionaries. They’ve broken into libraries, educated themselves, and manufacture bootleg nose filters to protect the poor from the pollution that’s killing them. They are an organized, serious, effective, underground resistance.
At one point, Richards carjacks a middle class woman and takes her hostage. She tells him his language is disgusting and he responds:
“It’s disgusting to get blackballed because you don’t want to work in a General Atomics job that’s going to make you sterile. It’s disgusting to sit home and watch your wife earning the grocery money on her back. It’s disgusting to know the Network is killing millions of people each year with air pollutants when they could be manufacturing nose filters for six bucks a throw…When this is over…you can go back to your nice split-level duplex and light up a Doke and get stoned and love the way your new silverware sparkles in the highboy. No one fighting rats with broomhandles in your neighborhood or shitting by the back stoop because the toilet doesn’t work. I met a little girl five years old with lung cancer. How’s that for disgusting? What do—”
“Stop!” she screamed at him. “You talk dirty!”
“That’s right,” he said, watching as the countryside flowed by. Hopelessness filled him like cold water. There was no base of communication with these beautiful chosen ones. They existed up where the air was rare. He had a sudden raging urge to make this woman pull over: knock her sunglasses onto the gravel, drag her through the dirt, make her eat a stone…ask her if she was beginning to see the big picture…”
His mother’s life, his own life, the War, cops running riot in the streets, poverty, brutal blue collar jobs — all of it connects in The Running Man. King has always said that the only book worth writing is one that is “true”, that is a serious attempt to honestly describe the world you see around you.
After finishing a first draft of The Running Man in 72 hours, King took a month to polish the novel, then sent it to Bill Thompson at Doubleday. Thompson didn’t pass it along to the publication board or even formally reject it. He simply waffled on it for a while. King then sent The Running Man to Ace books, a science fiction imprint which turned out a steady stream of sci-fi paperbacks, only to receive a curt note from then-edtior Donald A. Wolheim reading, “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.”
The Running Man is about a near future world where pollution takes a toll on the poor, where everyone is sedated by reality entertainment and over-the-counter drugs, where TV has replaced print media, where corporations are more powerful than the government, where the police are armed enforcers for the 1%, where the only way out is to sell your body, whether for sex or to be killed as entertainment. It’s a world that has to be overthrown with underground resistance, and by riots, and by flying planes into buildings, and by killing cops.
I don’t believe King thought he was writing a “negative utopia” with The Running Man. I think he looked around at where he was in the winter of 1972, I think he looked around at the world falling apart, and he wrote his truth.
* From what I can tell, The Running Man was written before Roadwork, but it was published last, so I’m putting it last here, too. And, like I said in the entry for Rage, it’s very hard to nail down the exact dates when King started writing the Bachman books so please forgive the license I’m possibly taking.