The Running Man: A Novel by Stephen King (MOBI)

Description

A desperate man attempts to win a reality TV game where the only objective is to stay alive in this #1 national bestseller from Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman.“Tomorrow at noon, the hunt begins. Remember his face!” Ben Richards is a desperate man. With no job, no money, no way out, and a young daughter in need of proper medical attention, he must turn to the only possibility of striking it rich in this near-future dystopian America: participating in the ultra-violent TV programming of the government-sanctioned Games Network. Ben soon finds himself selected as a contestant on the biggest and the best that the Games Network has to offer: “The Running Man,” a no-holds-barred thirty-day struggle to stay alive as public enemy number one, relentlessly hunted by an elite strike force bent on killing him as quickly as possible in front of an audience all-too eager to see that happen. It means a billion dollars in prize money if he can live for the next month. No one has ever survived longer than eight days. But desperation can push a person do things they never thought possible—and Ben Richards is willing to go the distance in this ultimate game of life and death….

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, and Doctor Sleep are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Running Man . . . Minus 100 and COUNTING . . . She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window. Beyond her, in the drizzle, the other highrises in Co-Op City rose like the gray turrets of a penitentiary. Below, in the airshaft, clotheslines flapped with ragged wash. Rats and plump alley cats circulated through the garbage. She looked at her husband. He was seated at the table, staring up at the Free-Vee with steady, vacant concentration. He had been watching it for weeks now. It wasn’t like him. He hated it, always had. Of course, every Development apartment had one—it was the law—but it was still legal to turn them off. The Compulsory Benefit Bill of 2021 had failed to get the required two-thirds majority by six votes. Ordinarily they never watched it. But ever since Cathy had gotten sick, he had been watching the big-money giveaways. It filled her with sick fear. Behind the compulsive shrieking of the half-time announcer narrating the latest newsie flick, Cathy’s flu-hoarsened wailing went on and on. “How bad is it?” Richards asked. “Not so bad.” “Don’t shit me.” “It’s a hundred and four.” He brought both fists down on the table. A plastic dish jumped into the air and clattered down. “We’ll get a doctor. Try not to worry so much. Listen—” She began to babble frantically to distract him; he had turned around and was watching the Free-Vee again. Half-time was over, and the game was on again. This wasn’t one of the big ones, of course, just a cheap daytime come-on called Treadmill to Bucks. They accepted only chronic heart, liver, or lung patients, sometimes throwing in a crip for comic relief. Every minute the contestant could stay on the treadmill (keeping up a steady flow of chatter with the emcee), he won ten dollars. Every two minutes the emcee asked a Bonus Question in the contestant’s category (the current pal, a heart-murmur from Hackensack, was an American history buff) which was worth fifty dollars. If the contestant, dizzy, out of breath, heart doing fantastic rubber acrobatics in his chest, missed the question, fifty dollars was deducted from his winnings and the treadmill was speeded up. “We’ll get along. Ben. We will. Really. I . . . I’ll . . .” “You’ll what?” He looked at her brutally. “Hustle? No more, Sheila. She’s got to have a real doctor. No more block midwife with dirty hands and whiskey breath. All the modern equipment. I’m going to see to it.” He crossed the room, eyes swiveling hypnotically to the Free-Vee bolted into one peeling wall above the sink. He took his cheap denim jacket off its hook and pulled it on with fretful gestures. “No! No, I won’t . . . won’t allow it. You’re not going to—” “Why not? At worst you can get a few oldbucks as the head of a fatherless house. One way or the other you’ll have to see her through this.” She had never really been a handsome woman, and in the years since her husband had not worked she had grown scrawny, but in this moment she looked beautiful . . . imperious. “I won’t take it. I’d rather sell the govie a two-dollar piece of tail when he comes to the door and send him back with his dirty blood money in his pocket. Should I take a bounty on my man?” He turned on her, grim and humorless, clutching something that set him apart, an invisible something for which the Network had ruthlessly calculated. He was a dinosaur in this time. Not a big one, but still a throwback, an embarrassment. Perhaps a danger. Big clouds condense around small particles. He gestured at the bedroom. “How about her in an unmarked pauper’s grave? Does that appeal to you?” It left her with only the argument of insensate sorrow. Her face cracked and dissolved into tears. “Ben, this is just what they want, for people like us, like you—” “Maybe they won’t take me,” he said, opening the door. “Maybe I don’t have whatever it is they look for.” “If you go now, they’ll kill you. And I’ll be here watching it. Do you want me watching that with her in the next room?” She was hardly coherent through her tears. “I want her to go on living.” He tried to close the door, but she put her body in the way. “Give me a kiss before you go, then.” He kissed her. Down the hall, Mrs. Jenner opened her door and peered out. The rich odor of corned beef and cabbage, tantalizing, maddening, drifted to them. Mrs. Jenner did well—she helped out at the local discount drug and had an almost uncanny eye for illegal-card carriers. “You’ll take the money?” Richards asked. “You won’t do anything stupid?” “I’ll take it,” she whispered. “You know I’ll take it.” He clutched her awkwardly, then turned away quickly, with no grace, and plunged down the crazily slanting, ill-lighted stairwell. She stood in the doorway, shaken by soundless sobs, until she heard the door slam hollowly five flights down, and then she put her apron up to her face. She was still clutching the thermometer she had used to take the baby’s temperature. Mrs. Jenner crept up softly and twitched the apron. “Dearie,” she whispered, “I can put you onto black market penicillin when the money gets here . . . real cheap . . . good quality—” “Get out!” she screamed at her. Mrs. Jenner recoiled, her upper lip rising instinctively away from the blackened stumps of her teeth. “Just trying to help,” she muttered, and scurried back to her room. Barely muffled by the thin plastiwood, Cathy’s wails continued. Mrs. Jenner’s Free-Vee blared and hooted. The contestant on Treadmill to Bucks had just missed a Bonus Question and had had a heart attack simultaneously. He was being carried off on a rubber stretcher while the audience applauded. Upper lip rising and falling metronomically, Mrs. Jenner wrote Sheila Richards’s name down in her notebook. “We’ll see,” she said to no one. “We’ll just see, Mrs. Smell-So-Sweet.” She closed the notebook with a vicious snap and settled down to watch the next game.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A real page turner. I read the book in a day. The story is fairly fast paced. The chapters are small (1-5 pages each). The chapter numbers start at 90 and count down to 0. It’s like a beat the clock type of thing. King’s writing pulls you in and makes you want to keep reading.The plot is basically that America has become overly obsessed with violence and sex and need to watch violent game shows to get their jollies. The main character is poor and supported by government “welfare”, but has a very sick 18 month old daughter that needs proper medical care, medicine, and a doctor. But due to the (dystopian) class system, the poor folk can only afford black market medication, that usually never really works. He basically says to himself that he’s got nothing to loose. So he chooses to fight the system and try out for one of the violent game shows where he could win $1 billion, but the catch is that you’ll have to survive 30 days outrunning a team of highly trained, heavily armed hunters. Your given a 12 hour head start and you can run anywhere in the world… before the hunters start. Your picture is broadcasted to everyone watching across the country, so the public is in on it too. If someone sees you they can call in a tip and be rewarded.And one more thing the main character finds out just as the game is about to begin… no contestant has ever made it through the full 30 days without being caught. When the time comes, and the hunters have you surrounded the show breaks into regularly scheduled programming, and your own personal “Waterloo” is broadcast live all over the country.But the main character is smart, maybe too smart…It is an easy read and a fast thriller.

⭐I knew that usually books are different than the movies directors make from them. This was totally different than the movie. Thus was totally unexpected and good read. I never read, in fact, I don’t like reading but I had to see the differences. Totally surprised.

⭐I loved this one. It is my favorite of all the Kings I’ve read. It is quite different from your average King book and story. Primarily, it isn’t overly wordy and self-indulgent. Except for chapter “minus 056” (which I would have cut), not a word is wasted. This one is tight, intelligent, observant and beautifully, artfully tells a very compelling story. I was hooked from page one, and read it in two sittings yesterday.I have been trying to like King for years, with little success. But I think I have found my way to him through Bachman, who (I suppose) allowed King to not be King for a bit. There is the usual awkward dragging in the last third, typical of King (what is it with him and endings?), but it is much less jarring and problematic here. I was not thrown out of the story by it, thankfully – which allowed me to receive the 11th hour sucker punch right on cue. Superb story… SO much better than the clownish movie that was ostensibly made from it.

⭐This is why I love reading Stephen King. He gives you a character you really care about, in a situation so desperate, but something everyone can identify with. Then for the next several hundred pages, he gives you every excuse in the book why things aren’t going to work out well for your favorite character. But you can’t give up on your character; he’s the guy you are rooting for. So you keep reading. And in the end, your guy is somehow, unbelievable that it is, on top, the winner. That is why I love reading Stephen King. Because the little guy still wins.

⭐Great story. This was the first King book I’ve read since Cujo in the early 80s. I certainly would have been pissed when the movie came out. What an insult to change it from the original story. What to read next?

⭐Loads different than the film and much better! Beautifully written and quite fast paced. Environmental and equity issues are discussed far ahead of its time. A must read.

⭐If you liked The Long Walk, the only other Bachman book I’ve read, then I think you’ll like this too. It’s faster than The Long Walk, and it’s set in a similar, though seemingly more sinister and cynical, dystopic future.

⭐I would recommend this book for anyone who likes suspense and anticipation. It seemed to start out slowly and took a little to sort the terms, but grew with intensity. I found myself getting more and more involved. The ending was intense.

⭐I love all Stephen Kings (Richard Bachman) work and I think this is one of his best.It is full of the darkness and disillusionment of his earlier years but combined with a more polished style and the triumph of our anti hero even as he flies to his death makes this extraordinarily compelling.I’ve lost count of the number of times i have read this story and yet i am enthralled every time.My advice to anyone considering this book is to read it immediately! Step in to Richards bleak world and despair with him as he struggles to overcome a system stacked against him and baying for his blood.

⭐Not really anything like the old Arnie film – they share a (very) basic concept and a title but that’s about it.Great story, great characters, great writing – everything you’d expect from Stephen King. Unfortunately we’ll never see a film of this that’s true to the book as the ending isn’t something that would ever be touched by a studio until our generation is in the grave (can’t say more without spoilers, but you’ll see what I mean.)A few hours of my life well spent.

⭐Much more gritty and dark than the film adaptation and a completely different setup barely recognizable from the arnie movie version a great read with cooler ending

⭐With the way things are going this seems like a likely future.They had a great idea with this one and I loved the story but it could have been so much better.

⭐Dark, gripping and apocalyptic story of society absorbed in quasi-reality. which keeps people away from true problems.It is amazing how many features King got right, he was writing quite some time ago.No happy ending, though. Be prepared for putting the book down and still thinking about it.

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