A small amount of spoilers for anyone who wishes to read the book or watch the new film. You have been warned.

I have read this before, and it’s one of those books I always remembered, so I decided to reread it. It started with me thinking that maybe I had misremembered how good it was. I wasn’t quite geling with it like I had remembered, but I persevered through the first few chapters, and I was drawn in again. It’s somehow very readable, even as it disturbs somewhat.

The Long Walk seems to be a metaphor for life, how we each fear death to varying degrees, and we hear and see other people have died, yet we have to continue with life regardless. Despite seeing and hearing of those around us who have died through the years, a lot of us spend time with the intellectual knowledge that we will one day die, yet emotionally, we often don’t quite believe it. It’s a weird cognitive dissonance I’ve observed in myself and others. This whole story seems to be an exercise in that fight inside our heads, that fear and panic at the knowledge of our death and how often to defeat that fear and panic, we bumble along and emotionally soothe ourselves.

This was readily observable in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. While people were dying, there were discussions on TV shows and YouTube videos about how the people most at risk were those with ‘underlying health issues. ‘ People would say things like, ‘I’m not too worried about Covid because I’m healthy.’ People said this a lot, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘I guess if they repeat it, they feel better about the uncertainty.’ People spoke of this with an element of pride in their supposed health status, but underneath it, as callous as it appeared, they were soothing themselves, because it could potentially be them, and deep down, I think a lot of them knew it.
Every time the new death count came on the news, people all consoled themselves that they hadn’t caught it yet, or they caught it and it felt like a common cold! Then you have the other people who got on a train from conspiracy station, anything to make their potential death a more controllable outcome. If it’s a conspiracy, then this virus isn’t real; actually, the whole thing was planned. Things are easier if everything is controllable by human hands. Even if controlled by evil humans, at least it was humans, and if evil humans had control, then good humans could regain control. If the virus isn’t real, then those invisible things that can make us feel bad, or cause chronic illness or indeed kill us, aren’t real.

I’ve had conversations before with people, talking about someone who has just died, and the person will say something like, ‘Well, he did have heart issues.’ Yeah, he may well have, but that doesn’t mean death won’t find you, too.

The character Stebbins seemed to be doing just fine, no warnings, not till the end, yet he didn’t win, did he?

Olson continued for a long time, despite appearing like the dead walking; some of the seemingly fittest walkers got their ticket not because of a physical setback, but because they went crazy.

That’s another thing life does to you: it can drive you crazy, and if it doesn’t drive you crazy, you may well have been born crazy so that you wouldn’t know the difference.

Then you had the crowd congealing into one mass face of the monster created by the Frankenstein-esque mediascape that promoted such a bloody dystopian idea, and how they felt joy and cheered on the bloody deaths.

Seems familiar. There is something in the human psyche that, when congealed together as one mass, they become monstrous entities controlled no longer by individuals but by a baser surge of bloodlust.

I enjoyed reading this book; Stephen King is a very hit-or-miss author with me. This is one of the hits.