#42 in Dystopian
The Long Walk
- 352
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
Affiliate link: buying through it supports BookRank at no extra cost to you.
Our view
“The Long Walk” shows how much dread a simple premise can hold: teenagers walk, and the walking does not stop. There is nothing supernatural here; the horror is psychological, and it is offset by real tenderness among the contestants. Some readers find the story repetitive and its large cast hard to keep apart. Spare and merciless, it suits those who like their dystopia stripped to the bone.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Long Walk is a dystopian horror novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1979, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Set in a dystopian alternative version of the United States ruled by a totalitarian regime, the plot follows the contestants of a grueling annual walking contest. While not the first of King's novels to be published, The Long Walk was the first novel he wrote, having begun it in 1966–67 during his freshman year at the University of Maine, some eight years before his first published novel, Carrie, was released in 1974.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.8 across 997 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 87% of the weight and the score stays at 7.7 — the Dystopian average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.7 | 50 | 5% |
| Hardcover | 7.8 | 947 | 95% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Long Walk?
It has 352 pages — shorter than 67% of the ranked books in Dystopian.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Dystopian — with scores between 7.5 and 8.0, closest to this book.
