Stephen King is in his first year at the University of Maine. It’s 1966. He’s 20 years old, scratching out poetry on paper napkins in the Ford Room cafeteria about Dark Men striding across America and attacking women in fields, banging out stories on weekends about college students pointing hunting rifles out their dorm room windows and picking off their fellow students. In the midst of all this, he makes his first professional sale. “The Glass Floor” sold to Startling Mystery Stories for $35 and is about a guy who goes to a remote mansion to investigate the murder of his sister, discovers that she’s died in a library with an uncanny glass floor that induces vertigo, and then he becomes its latest victim. Readers of Startling Mystery ranked it their 15th favorite story of the year.
King took classes in the College of Education so he could become a teacher in case the writing thing didn’t work out, but this sale gave him hope that it would. With poverty nipping at his heels, and writing as his only way out, he spent his freshman year banging out a novel described as “a dystopian fantasy set in a parallel world” and showed it to his poetry teacher, Burton Hatlen.
Hatlen took it home and left it on his dining room table where his wife picked it up, started reading, and couldn’t stop. Then Hatlen read it and, “I was simply stunned. There was an immediate sense of plot and pace; the control of narrative seemed instinctive. There was no suggesting that he needed to learn any of that.” King also showed it to the creative writing teacher, Ted Holmes, and when Hatlen and Holmes ran into each other in the faculty lounge they said, “We’ve got a writer.”
But all they could provide was encouragement. They didn’t have publishing industry contacts. So King sent the novel off to the Bennett Cerf First Novel Contest but nothing ever came of it, probably because the Bennett Cerf First Novel contest was a scam preying on the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers. But King had another outlet: literary journals. He published an enormous amount of poetry and fiction in the University of Maine’s literary journal, Ubris, and in other small journals, some affiliated with the university, some not, but all of them crammed to bursting with student work.
King published poems like “Donovan’s Brain”, “Silence”, “Brooklyn August”, and “The Hardcase Speaks” in the poetry anthology Moth, in Onan, in Io, in Contraband, while Ubris was home for his fiction and poetry, much of which later saw publication. “Stud City” a short story that was excerpted in King’s novella “The Body” as an example of the narrator’s own writing, appeared in Ubris in 1969, and so did “Night Surf” a story that would appear in King’s 1978 short story collection, Night Shift, the same with “Strawberry Spring”, while “Here There Be Tygers” and “Cain Rose Up” appeared in Ubris in 1968 before being reprinted in King’s 1985 anthology, Skeleton Crew.
King kept writing. He wrote an early draft of the story that would become “Graveyard Shift” and read it on Halloween in a darkened lecture hall. He had his poem “The Bone Church” performed at a coffeehouse by his friend, Jimmy Smith. He wrote a weekly column in The Maine Campus newspaper called “King’s Garbage Truck.” His first column was a 700-word review of Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. The “Garbage Truck” would run until he graduated, 47 weekly installments in all. He worked in the Commons, he worked in the library, he sold his blood for cash, he got paid to write research papers for other students
King kept writing. He wrote constantly. Right before he graduated he made his second professional sale, this time it was called “The Reaper’s Image” also sold to Startling Mystery Stories. They even put his name on the cover. King co-taught a class on contemporary popular literature. He collected rejection slips. He kept writing — banging on his Underwood so hard he snapped its typebars and had to fill in letters by hand (an experience he’d recycle in Misery).
King kept writing. He wrote three more novels and each one was rejected before he finally sold Carrie. He would turn out short stories, some of which sold, a lot of which were rejected. King kept writing. Pounding away on his Underwood, one book, one story, one manuscript, one rejection letter after another. Over, and over, and over again for years. So it comes as no surprise that the “dystopian fantasy set in a parallel world” he wrote in the middle of all this hard slogging was called The Long Walk.
Set in a near-future America run by a totalitarian government, The Long Walk is the ultimate bread and circus distraction for the masses. Thousands of boys (only boys) apply for one of the 100 places as a Walker. If they make the cut, they go to Hamlin, ME and start walking down Route 1. They are not allowed to stop walking. Their pace cannot drop below 4 miles per hour. If it does, they’ll be shot. The Long Walk ends when there is only one boy left alive. That boy gets The Prize.
The event is monstrously popular and crowds line the route, cheering for the boys as their bodies break down and they slowly go insane from exhaustion, fear, and the monotony of the road. Soldiers follow The Walk, issuing warnings to boys whose pace drops, shooting the ones who don’t speed back up. 99 boys get a bullet in the head over the course of this book, even if they’re already dead from exhaustion.
The bad daddy behind The Long Walk is The Major, the much-loved military commander of the country’s secret police. When the book begins, the Walkers idolize and worship him, but as the route wears them down they begin to turn, mocking him, ridiculing him, and finally coming to hate him. The main character is a Walker named Garraty whose father was rounded up and shot by The Major’s secret death squad years ago because he spoke out against The Walk, but The Major isn’t just a figurative father figure for these boys — one of them will later reveal he’s his literal father figure, too.
It would be hard to find a more on-the-nose metaphor for the Vietnam War than The Long Walk: a bunch of boys eager to prove themselves sign up and get sent somewhere far from home where they have to walk, and walk, and walk until they’re shot, one after the other. But King actually seemed to have something else on his mind when he wrote The Long Walk: a lottery. And not the draft lottery (which wouldn’t be announced until December, 1970, after this book had at least had a first draft written) but Shirley Jackson’s lottery.
Jackson's famous short story, “The Lottery”, was published in 1948 and King was a big, big fan. He’d talk at length about the influence Shirley Jackson had on ‘Salem’s Lot but she had a big impact on this book, too. For those who somehow skipped high school English class, “The Lottery” revolves around a public ritual in a small town in Vermont. Everyone is super excited to gather in the town square and draw slips of paper, and the person who gets the one with the black spot gets stoned to death. On the one hand, King’s novel and Jackson’s short story are very far apart, on the other hand, two stories about excited communities participating in a meaningless ritual that ends in public murder may not live in the same house, but they’re at least located on the same bus route.
In “The Lottery” one character famously cries, “It isn’t fair” before being stoned to death. “It isn’t fair” becomes a kind of mantra in The Long Walk, repeated by Garraty as Walkers go down with colds and leg cramps, as they get bullets in the back of the head because they make a minor miscalculation or lose their minds. King further underlines the Jackson connection when Garraty walks through a small town in the middle of the night and feels “as if he had just walked through a Shirley Jackson short story.” Not the kind of thing you expect to hear from a teenage boy, but definitely the kind of thing you expect to hear from a slightly older writer who’s got Shirley Jackson on the mind.
The big difference between Jackson’s short story and King’s long novel lies in the central ritual. The origins of Jackson’s lottery have been lost over time. There’s a suggestion it has something to do with a fertility ritual (“Lottery in June,” one character intones, “Corn be heavy soon.”) but the Walkers in King’s book are there for The Prize. Outlast all the other Walkers and you get a prize that’s…whatever you want? Money? Fame? A nice house? So few Walkers get to enjoy it that some Walkers speculate there is no prize. You just get taken out back and shot. At least Jackson’s lottery bears the suggestion of deep, meaningful roots, even if they are lost in the mists of time. The Long Walk is no deeper than a game show.
King starts almost every chapter with a quotation from a game show and, placed beside descriptions of characters losing their minds, feet being flayed by asphalt, and teenage boys being shot in the back by unsmiling soldiers, the forced Polident smiles of the game show language feels like empty lunatic grins. You can’t read a quote like “You will have thirty seconds, and please remember that your answer must be in the form of a question,” immediately after reading about a kid getting shot in the head and not feel like the person you’re talking to has eyes that are just a little bit too bright, a smile that’s just a little bit too big. It’s the best use of epigraphs in King’s entire career, and it happens in this little book he didn’t even publish under his own name.
While it takes place outdoors, The Long Walk feels only slightly less claustrophobic than Rage. Confined to a single highway the characters can do nothing except keep walking or die. They have to put one foot ahead of the other, over, and over, and over again on their long march to nowhere. They spend a lot of their time wondering what drew them here, digging deep within themselves to figure out why they really signed up for The Walk, and their answers are barely compelling. There is no meaning in it. There is no dignity. There is no Prize. They’re here because they’re here, and they have to keep going because the only alternative is to lie down and die. It’s a long march, a forced march, a march with no finish line except the moment you give up. You just keep going, writing another story, sending it out, getting rejected, writing another story, sending it out, getting rejected, over and over and over again until you could go insane.