Interesting. Similar to The Running Man in some respects. Not so much the game show, or reality TV, feeling - in fact there is only casual mention of local media coming out to get some footage. One hundred boys are selected from the pool of applicants to participate and they start in northern Maine and walk to death. They must walk at a rate no less than four miles per hour and they do not stop until only one of them is still alive. If they slow down, they get three warnings and if they are not back on the pace in 30 seconds they are shot by the monitoring soldiers. No rest breaks, no sleep breaks, no potty breaks, no meal breaks. They are supplied with food and water to consume as they walk. I assume that King did the research on the physiological effects of such a thing; the effects he describes are pretty gruesome.
A little predictable - the narrator is one of the participants - so, since everyone but the winner is dead at the end, it is a fair bet that he is going to win. I suppose that King could have done an All Quiet on the Western Front number, but that doesn't really seem to be his style.
The setting is not so unregenerately distopic as The Running Man, but there are hints. The hero's father is not in the picture because he was "squaded" after speaking too freely against the government in action reminescent of the stories we have heard of the death squads in some parts of the world. In general, it seems very much like America in the fifties, while June Cleaver reigned and everyone went around trying to believe that everything was "jes' fine," to quote Grundoon (sp?) a well-known political figure of the time. Except, of course, for the fact that they selected 100 of thousands of volunteers and killed them one by one.
On a different, but related subject: I love my Kindle!!!!
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