It was a vast stage without scenery, inviting him to run across, easily seen in the blazing illumination, easily caught, easily shot down.

The Seashell hummed in his ear.

“. . . watch for a man running . . . watch for the running man . . . watch for a man alone, on foot . . . watch . . .”

RAY BRADBURY, FAHRENHEIT 451. 1953.

Published in 1982, The Running Man is Stephen King’s fourth novel written under his pseudonym Richard Bachman; it will be the next Bachman novel, Thinner in 1985, that will enable the reading public to identify Bachman as King.

Summary

In the year 2025, Ben and Sheila Richards are living in a Development apartment in Co-Op City, and their infant daughter Cathy is sick. Recently, Ben has been watching the game shows on the “Free-Vee” obsessively, and now he leaves to go to the network building to apply to be on one of these shows to get some money to treat Cathy. At the Games Building, he’s put through a lot of tests and is chosen for a show called The Running Man; we learn he’s chosen for this for the same reason he hasn’t been able to get steady work in recent years and has been living in poverty: he’s “‘regarded as antiauthoritarian and antisocial’” based on insubordinate interactions with previous work superiors. An executive named Killian explains the show’s rules: Richards will be on the run and if the show’s “hunters” don’t capture him in thirty days, he’ll get a billion dollars. Richards has to mail in regular recordings of himself to air on the show; Killian claims they won’t use these to trace his whereabouts while also noting Richards is generally being set up to fail (no one has ever won the billion dollars). 

Richards is brought on the show and sees that both his own and his wife’s photos that the show airs have been doctored to make them look worse than they are. Then he’s let loose from the building and goes to a connection from his neighborhood who can get him some fake identification papers; he makes it to NYC and then Boston, where he stays in a YMCA. After he sends his first tape recording to the network, he suspects hunters are trailing him and narrowly escapes through a tunnel after blowing up an oil tank in the YMCA’s basement. When Richards emerges from a manhole after this close call, he’s seen by a 7-year-old whom he pays to go get his older brother, who’s connected to a gang who can help him. The brother, Bradley, brings Richards home (while there he’s able to watch an installment of The Running Man and Richards sees they’re also doctoring the recordings he’s sending in); Bradley gets him out of Boston by hiding him in the trunk of his car and he–again narrowly–escapes being discovered during a road-block traffic stop. Bradley procures Richards a car and Richards poses as a priest in the town of Manchester, then goes to find a connection of Bradley’s named Elton Parrakis; the pair bonded over researching the true damage of the rampant pollution and how deaths from cancer are being covered up. Elton’s mother ends up calling the police after recognizing Richards as the Running Man, and when Elton tries to help him escape they end up in a car chase with the police. A police cruiser bumper breaks Richards’ ankle and he gets shot in the arm, but he shoots at the cruiser and it crashes and they escape with Elton, fatally injured, driving the car off and leaving Richards at an abandoned construction site. 

The next day Richards crutches to a town and convinces a boy to mail in his tape clips for him. Then, at a Stop sign, he hijacks a car driven by a lone woman named Amelia Williams, and directs her to drive to a jetport in Derry 150 miles away. After the police shoot at them without any concern about potentially killing Amelia, Richards calls the media to ensure there are cameras broadcasting from there by the time they arrive at the jetport. Having convinced Amelia that the Network has manipulated things and that he’s not really the bad guy, he tells her when she leaves the car that she needs to tell the police he has dynamite on him, when really he’s just got her clutch purse in his pocket and is bluffing. She claims she can’t do it, but when she’s gone and the cops don’t shoot him he figures she did lie to them about the dynamite. The cops honor his demand for a plane with a crew, which he boards, demanding Amelia’s presence on the plane as well. He meets the show’s head hunter Evan McCone, who also gets on the plane and who notes that Richards has broken the record for the contestant who’s lasted the longest on the show. Once they’re in the air, flying low over populated areas so cops won’t blow up the plane, Killian the Network executive speaks to Richards on a monitor and tells him that Sheila and Cathy were stabbed to death days ago by intruders, and that they want to fake his death and have him join their side as a hunter (an offer that enrages McCone). Richards agrees, but then knocks out one of his guards with a coffeepot and shoots the pilots, and he and McCone end up shooting each other. Dying with his intestines hanging out, Richards flies the plane into the Network’s Games Building. 

The End.

Different Races

As for plot and pacing, each chapter being headed with a countdown “…Minus [x] and Counting…” might seem hackneyed (the starting at “100” for the countdown is technically arbitrary) but is actually a fairly simple and effective trick to create tension, like the timer ticking down on a bomb, which is appropriate here since the arc in fact culminates in an explosion. The basic framework of the structure, the arc of Richards’ “running,” is provided by the characters who move him through three primary phases of his journey that entail a literal geographic transfer, and these would be 1) Bradley, 2) Parrakis, and 3) Amelia.

Probably three factors the most worthy of discussion here are: the similarities to the previous Bachman novels, particularly The Long Walk and Roadwork, the dystopic treatment of the year 2025 including creepy foreshadowing of 9/11, and the text’s blatant racism.

Of course these factors are all interrelated to different degrees. The main Roadwork connection to me is that the alienation and fate of Ben Richards is the same as Roadwork’s Barton Dawes but on a larger scale; Dawes’ suffering is more localized and private, and we end with him blowing up his own house. Richards gets to run all over the place–and in general his victimization by the system is probably more sympathetic than Dawes–and he also will die in an explosion at the end, but one that will take a lot more people out (house v. building). Since Richards is competing in a contest for spectator/consumer pleasure, this effectively makes this novel a hybrid of The Long Walk and Roadwork.

Roadwork is explicitly tagged a novel of the Energy Crisis and is set during that period in the 1970s; The Running Man purports to be set in 2025 but is equally obsessed with this 70s Energy Crisis period, though not in a way that really dates it per se since climate change, obviously, has only gotten worse. (We don’t seem to be at the advent of “air cars” even if that’s exactly where we should be.) The novel is freakishly prescient in some ways, the state coverup of pollution’s link to cancer and the general extremity of the environmental situation reminiscent of Exxon covering up direct evidence of climate change back in the 80s…

The primary freakishly prescient element is probably how the narrative heralds the era of reality television, and more than that, the connection between 9/11 as a staged production and this era, as the terrorists’ awareness of the power of the televised images of the disaster influenced their planning:

It is not a hidden truth that some violent and self-destructive people crave an audience. Broadcast television birthed the theatre of media-age terrorism half a century ago. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed imagined the September 11th attacks as a reality-television producer would—their political power was inseparable in his thinking from the fact that the images would be shown over and over on television. Since then, digital technology has democratized broadcast production—lowered the barriers to entry, as economists would put it. Even the Taliban, which banned cameras and music in its initial phase, now produces and distributes snuff videos of its guerrilla and suicide attacks. If it weren’t for digital production and its potential for worldwide distribution on social media, the Islamic State might be of marginal concern outside of the Arab world.

From here.

(I’m so behind on writing about my King reading that I actually started my re-read of this novel to start writing about it on…9/11/21.) This Bachman novel also reminds me of the first one, Rage, and that novel’s influence on gun violence in schools, so direct in that case that King had it pulled from publication because school shooters had copies of it in their locker…one wonders if certain terrorists might have had copies of The Running Man in their knapsacks…though I will say about this plot development that while it is, on the surface, extremely satisfying for Richards to take out these network assholes with him, the feasibility of his managing to execute this feat is more than a little hard to buy–the plane having been on autopilot for most of the flight, it’s unclear how Richards would really be able to direct it toward such a specific target. Yet it “works” because we’re satisfied by Richards weaponizing that which was weaponized against him to take out the ones who weaponized it. (What doesn’t really work is that it seems we’re ultimately to believe it’s true that Richards’ wife and daughter, whom he is doing the game (and thus the entire book) for in the first place, were killed by excessive stabbing in a random break-in that is apparently unconnected to his being a contestant on the famous show, when it seems like their connection to him from the show is exactly what should have been the reason for their murder: thus the effort to save them would be responsible for killing them.)

It also seems important to note that in this scenario, you the reader are rooting for the figure who is plowing the plane into the building! The network honchos are depicted as essentially selling an image to the public of Richards-as-terrorist (they do this even more blatantly in the 1987 film adaptation). This reminded me of narrative themes related to my experience of going to see the musical Wicked (pre-Covid):

For me, having to shove through the morass of Times Square on a December Saturday afternoon in order to get to the theater where Wicked was playing provided another layer of thematic development. Being stuck in a horde of people when one is running late to get somewhere does not make one think the best of one’s fellow woman. I can’t even remember now if it was me or the friend I was with who joked about understanding why someone (i.e. terrorists) would want to blow up all of this shit-show sea of people being blasted by the seizure-inducing flashing lights of gigantic advertisements. We conceded it was probably not a good idea to make that joke too loudly. It all made me think of the good v. evil narrative that the Bush administration propagated after 9/11. It was easy to think of the terrorists as evil, harder to try to understand that perhaps there could have been reasons they did what they did other than just being pure evil, reasons that had to do with things America had done. A whole other post could be written about how Elphaba’s trajectory in Wicked dovetails with America’s surrounding 9/11, if you consider her character arc of becoming as bad as those she was fighting against (going to the “dark side” as exemplified in Abu Ghraib). It’s interesting that the musical version (the novel having been published pre-9/11) was launched in ’03, when the good-v-evil narrative was being propagated so intensely in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq.

From here.

Per the outcome of The Running Man, Richards, by flying the plane into the Games building, patently avoids becoming as bad as those he was fighting against when his doing so is figured as a blatant rejection of the offer to join the Games team as a hunter.

The reality-television era is marked by 9/11 but also the advent of Trump, who many argue would never have become President without the platform of The Apprentice. The creepiness of this connection is only accentuated by a promotional tag line that initiates the text:

In the year 2025, the best men don’t run for president, they run for their lives….

It’s the president of the television network who’s the one with power (and thus evil) in The Running Man, but both the Trump connection and the fact that actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Richards in the 1987 film adaptation AND that pro-wrestler-turned-actor-turned governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura plays Captain Freedom (a character that’s not in the book) lends seemingly unintended–despite the tag line–resonance to the descriptor “running”: politicians, or political candidates, “run,” and do so in a way that’s explicitly produced for media imagery and consumption. Not that the text doesn’t point out the connection between politics, media, and manipulation at the center of this game show:

“It’ll work. I think. There will be a dozen free-lance cameramen around in no time, hoping to get some Games money or even the Zapruder Award itself. With that kind of publicity, they’ll have to play it straight.”

Richard Bachman. The Running Man. 1982.

This implicitly highlights the irony of the infamous footage of the JFK assassination (footage…shot by Matthew Zapruder), with JFK’s success as a politician often attributed to the advent and prominence of televised imagery.

If you’re running, you’re in a “race,” connecting the political themes to the novel’s appalling racism, made more appalling by the fact that the novel purports to be set in 2025, rendering the regular use of the term “Negro” (in a non-slur context) that much more grating. Grating as well is the use of slurs intended to depict that the era (but not the author!) is still racist (“darkie,” “pickaninnies”). This novel definitely has more black characters than previous Bachmans and possibly any King novel up to this point between Bradley and Killian the executive, but possibly the most appalling (I will keep using this word) is a nameless boy with a grievance:

When Richards walked into the lobby, the desk clerk was arguing with a tiny, scruffly black boy in a killball jersey so big that it reached down over his blue jeans to midshin. The disputed territory seemed to be a gum machine that stood inside the lobby door.

“I loss my nickel, honky. I loss my muh-fuhn nickel!”

…

The boy kicked the plaxteel post of the gum machine, then ran. “Muh-fuhn white honky sum bitch!”

Richard Bachman. The Running Man. 1982.

“Scruffly”? “Honky”?? (I am wondering if “scruffly” here is a typo in my e-book since “scruffy” is used elsewhere.) Here is evidence that the text is racist rather than the times the text is trying to depict; in typical King fashion, you can sense the author trying to depict the times as racist at certain…times, while at others it’s just confusing, as when Richards is being tested for the games with ink blots and responds to one by designating it not “Negro,” but the N-word–the text is fairly opaque about whether Richards might be messing with his ostensible captors…he also does use the word “Negro” to describe one of the ink blots–“‘Two Negro women. Kissing.'”–offering a conflation of my two favorite problematic threads through King’s work, racism and homophobia. The latter takes a backseat to the former in general in this novel, but the treatment of both work together to reinforce the utter failure of the text to transcend 1975 in what’s supposed to be a depiction of 2025:

“I didn’t mean to mouth off,” he said unwillingly. Richards thought he could peg him. Well-off young men with a lot of free time often spent much of it roaming the shabby pleasure areas of the big cities, roaming in well-heeled packs, sometimes on foot, more often on choppers. They were queer-stompers. Queers, of course, had to be eradicated. Save our bathrooms for democracy. They rarely ventured beyond the twilight pleasure areas into the full darkness of the ghettos. When they did, they got the shit kicked out of them.

Richard Bachman. The Running Man. 1982.

You can see the authorial effort to depict the times rather than the text/Richards as racist and homophobic when the “bad guys” at the network who function as our protagonist-Richards’ captors and tormentors voice a parallel between our protagonist’s defining heroic-protagonist trait and racism and homophobia:

“In short, you are regarded as antiauthoritarian and antisocial. You’re a deviate who has been intelligent enough to stay out of prison and serious trouble with the government, and you’re not hooked on anything. A staff psychologist reports you saw lesbians, excrement, and a pollutive gas vehicle in various inkblots.”

Richard Bachman. The Running Man. 1982.

I’m confused by the use of the verb “deviate” for what seems intended to mean the noun “deviant” in this context, and this confusion is an apt representation of that generated by the racism King-Bachman exhibits specifically via his efforts to not be racist: I can see that you meant “deviant” (i.e., to not be racist) but that’s not what you’ve put in the version of your actual text…and not not being racist means…

For more context on/evidence of The Running Man‘s inadvertent racism–or potentially the racism masquerading, or attempting to masquerade, as its opposite–we can look at the depictions of the two primary black characters, Bradley and Killian. Bradley represents a more general problem with the characterization of Richards in that we see he exists only to characterize Richards rather than as a character in his own right. My bigger problem with this use of Bradley is that through it Richards is characterized as what might be designated “Black in spirit” (kind of like the “first Black president” designation for Bill Clinton)–Bradley and Bradley’s family are moved to help Richards because he is an impoverished, alienated, marginalized specimen in this society, as are they. Richards is in a sense sociopolitically Black, and if a version of this game show did exist, it seems very possible that targeted demographics might be more likely to root for a black man to be hunted down and killed rather than a white one–probably this is the real horror of this dystopian futuristic premise for King, the prospect of mainstream America cheering for the white man’s death.

So Bradley is willing to put himself at risk, to essentially sacrifice himself for Richards (it is he who delivers Richards a priest costume, no less), to fight for the greater cause against their shared oppressors. This characterization becomes more revealing juxtaposed with the next party willing to help Richards, Bradley’s white friend via correspondence, Parrakis (who is overweight and evoked with some fairly fat-phobic descriptions). The rising-action escalation in this stage of Richards’ journey, requiring a complication to up the stakes, necessarily implicates race: the police are called because someone is not willing to sacrifice herself to help Richards, and that would be Parrakis’ white mother–she is patently unwilling to help the pseudo-Black Richards–not just unwilling to help/sacrifice, but attempting to actively deter him.

Killian has somewhat similar but different or possibly inverted versions of this problem in that he’s a Black character with status and power–a network executive–but, he’s evil, so this creates and undertone–or really overtone–of horror in the Black man in a position of power using that power against the white man, even if that man is pseudo-black.

Killian is introduced in the text thus:

The man behind the desk was of middle height and very black. So black, in fact, that for a moment Richards was struck with unreality. He might have stepped out of a minstrel show.

Richard Bachman. The Running Man. 1982.

Last semester, when I was teaching an elective on horror at an arts high school in which we read Carrie, one student asked how similar Carrie was to the rest of King’s work, if you’d be able to tell it was him writing it if you didn’t know–a question equally pertinent to King’s work as his alter ego Richard Bachman. To my mind, though some say Carrie is different than King’s other books, the primary giveaway/marker of King’s touch in his debut novel would be the parenthetical references to intruding/subconscious thoughts. But there’s actually another giveaway in connection with the above Running Man passage, and that is invoking comparisons to “minstrel” shows, which Carrie does twice. I was appalled to see this comparison appear in a King book as late as 1999–appearing in the point of view of the nine-year-old girl protagonist of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon–and probably to later works I haven’t gotten to yet…

To me, The Running Man reinforces that the connective tissue of the Bachman novels is that of a white male protagonist rendered pseudo-Other in his victimization by a larger system, underwritten by the horror of the idea that a white male could be the victim. As much as the original film adaptation diverged from its source material, it retained this fundamental core, and I don’t mean to sound too cynical when I don’t hold out much hope that the latest reboot will represent much progress on this front…

-SCR