![]() First edition cover | |
Author | Stephen King (as Richard Bachman) |
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Genre | Science fiction |
Publisher | Signet Books |
Publication date | May 4, 1982 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (paperback) |
Pages | 219 |
ISBN | 978-0-451-11508-9 |
The Running Man is a dystopian thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, first published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982 as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the omnibus The Bachman Books . The novel is set in a dystopian United States during the year 2025, in which the nation's economy is in ruins and world violence is rising. The story follows protagonist Ben Richards as he participates in the reality show The Running Man, in which contestants win money by evading a team of hitmen sent to kill them.
In 2025, the world's economy is in shambles and America has become a totalitarian dystopia. Ben Richards, an impoverished 28-year-old resident of the fictional Co-Op City, is unable to find work, having been blacklisted from his trade. His gravely ill daughter Cathy needs medicine, and his wife Sheila has resorted to prostitution to bring in money for the family. In desperation, Richards turns to the Games Network, a government-operated television station that runs violent game shows. After rigorous physical and mental testing, Richards is selected to appear on The Running Man, the Network's most popular, lucrative, and dangerous program. He is interviewed by Dan Killian, the executive producer of the program, who describes the challenges he will face once the game begins. He also meets Fred Victor, the director of the show, and Bobby Thompson, the MC and host.
The contestant is declared an enemy of the state and released with a 12-hour head start before the Hunters, an elite team of Network-employed hitmen, are sent out to kill him. The contestant earns $100 per hour that he stays alive and avoids capture, an additional $100 for each law enforcement officer or Hunter he kills, and a grand prize of $1 billion if he survives for 30 days. Viewers can receive cash rewards for informing the Network of the runner's whereabouts. The runner is given $4,800 and a pocket video camera before he leaves the studio. He can travel anywhere in the world, and each day he must videotape two messages and mail them back to the studio for broadcasting. If he neglects to send the messages, he will be held in default of his Games contract and stop accumulating prize money, but will continue to be hunted indefinitely. Killian states that no contestant has survived long enough to claim the grand prize, nor does he expect anyone to ever do so. Richards simply hopes that he will last long enough to secure his family's future with his prize money.
As the game begins, Richards obtains a disguise and false identification records, traveling first to New York City and then Boston. In Boston, he is tracked down by the Hunters and only narrowly escapes, setting off an explosion in the basement of a YMCA building that kills five police officers. He sneaks away through a sewer pipe and emerges in the city's impoverished ghetto, where he takes shelter with gang member Bradley Throckmorton and his family. Richards learns from Bradley that the air is severely polluted and that the city's poor have become a permanent underclass. Bradley also says that the Network exists only as a propaganda machine to pacify and distract the public. Richards tries to incorporate this information into his video messages, but finds that the Network dubs over his voice with obscenities and threats during the broadcast.
Bradley smuggles Richards past a government checkpoint to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he disguises himself as a half-blind priest. In addition, Bradley provides Richards with a set of mailing labels for his videotapes that will leave the Network unable to track him by their postmarks. While spending three days in Manchester, Richards learns that another contestant has been killed, and he dreams that Bradley has betrayed him after being tortured. He travels to a safe house owned by a friend of Bradley in Portland, Maine, but is reported by the owner's mother. As the police and the Hunters close in on the safe house, Richards is wounded, but manages to escape and spends the night sleeping at an abandoned construction site. The next morning, after arranging to mail his videotapes, Richards carjacks a woman named Amelia Williams and takes her hostage. Alerting the media to his presence, he makes his way to an airport in Derry. The police confront Richards, but he bluffs his way onto a plane past both them and the lead Hunter, Evan McCone, by pretending to be carrying an explosive charge powerful enough to destroy the entire facility. By this time, Richards has broken the Running Man survival record of eight days and five hours. The news of Richards' success causes the once complacent and submissive lower class to rise up against their elite class oppressors all over the country, the police unable to stop it.
Richards takes McCone and Amelia as hostages and has the plane fly low over populated areas to avoid being shot down by a surface-to-air missile. Killian calls Richards aboard the plane and reveals that he knows Richards has no explosives, as the plane's security system would have detected them. To Richards' surprise, Killian offers him a chance to replace McCone as lead Hunter. Richards is hesitant to take the offer, worried that his family will become a target. Killian then informs him that Sheila and Cathy have been dead for over ten days, murdered by intruders long before Richards first appeared on the show. Killian gives him some time to make his decision. Richards falls asleep and dreams of his murdered family and a gruesome crime scene. With nothing left to lose, he calls Killian back and accepts the offer. After the contact has been severed, he kills the flight crew and McCone, but suffers a mortal gunshot wound from the latter. Richards allows Amelia to jump off the plane with a parachute, and then uses the last of his strength to override the autopilot and fly toward the skyscraper serving as the headquarters of the Games Network. The book ends with the plane crashing into the tower, resulting in the deaths of Richards and Killian. The novel closes with the description: "The explosion was tremendous, lighting up the night like the wrath of God, and it rained fire twenty blocks away."
The Running Man is the last of four books written by King that were published between 1977 and 1982 under the name Richard Bachman, which were reissued in one volume as The Bachman Books (1985). The others are Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), and Roadwork (1981). [1] King created "Richard Bachman" to be his long-term alias, not just a temporary writing identity, [2] but the author's real identity was leaked to the media shortly after the publication of the fifth Bachman novel, Thinner (1984). Although Bachman is now known to be King, he revived the pen name for two further novels: The Regulators (1996) and Blaze (2007). He also based The Dark Half , a horror novel published in 1989, on Bachman's outing. [2] : 3
According to King's 2002 memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft , he wrote The Running Man within a single week, compared to his normal 2,000-word or ten-page daily output—so that writing a novel normally takes approximately three months. [3] In "The Importance of Being Bachman", a new introduction to the 1996 edition of The Bachman Books, King describes The Running Man as "a book written by a young man who was angry, energetic, and infatuated with the art and the craft of writing". [2] : 3–4 In the same introduction, King describes Ben Richards as "scrawny" and "pre-tubercular". He observes that Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played Ben Richards in the film adaptation of The Running Man, portrayed the character very differently than he wrote about him in the book, saying that Richards (in the book) was "as far away from the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the movie as you can get". [2] : 4
The novel was loosely adapted into a film with the same name in 1987, five years after the book was released. The adaptation only retained the general idea of the violent show and a few names. The film starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as Richards. [4] [5] The film was later made into a video game released on several home computer platforms. In 2022, Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed The Running Man 2 as a sequel to his 1987 film. [6]
In 2021, a new film adaptation of the novel is in development, with Edgar Wright directing, Michael Bacall penning the screenplay, [7] and Glen Powell starring. [8]
Richard Bachman is a pen name of American horror fiction author Stephen King, adopted in 1977 for the novel Rage. King hid the link between himself and Bachman, until allowing for his identification in 1985. He collected the first four Bachman novels into The Bachman Books. Rage became controversial for being about a school shooting and was allowed to go out of print after the 1997 Heath High School shooting. Three more novels were published under the Bachman name.
Stephen Edwin King is an American author. Called the "King of Horror", he has also explored other genres, among them suspense, crime, science-fiction, fantasy and mystery. Though known primarily for his novels, he has written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in collections.
The Long Walk is a dystopian horror novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1979, under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books, and has seen several reprints since, as both paperback and hardcover. In 2023, Centipede Press released the first stand-alone hardcover edition.
Francesco Maria Columbu was an Italian-American bodybuilder, powerlifter, actor, author, producer, and a licensed chiropractor.
Richard Dawson was an English-American actor, comedian, game-show host, and panelist in the United States. Dawson was well known for playing Corporal Peter Newkirk in Hogan's Heroes, as a regular panelist on Match Game (1973–1978), and as the original host of Family Feud.
Predator is a 1987 American science fiction action film directed by John McTiernan and written by brothers Jim and John Thomas. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as Dutch Schaefer, the leader of an elite paramilitary rescue team on a mission to save hostages in guerrilla-held territory in a Central American rainforest, who encounter the deadly Predator, a skilled, technologically advanced extraterrestrial who stalks and hunts them down. Carl Weathers, Elpidia Carrillo, Bill Duke, Richard Chaves, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, and Shane Black are supporting co-stars.
Rage is a psychological thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, the first he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It was published in 1977 and was collected in the 1985 hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books. The novel describes a school shooting, and has been associated with actual high school shooting incidents in the 1980s and 1990s. In response, King allowed the novel to fall out of print. In 2013, King published the anti-firearms violence essay "Guns".
The Bachman Books is a collection of short novels by Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1982. It made The New York Times Best Seller list upon its release in 1985.
Predator 2 is a 1990 American science fiction action film written by brothers Jim and John Thomas, directed by Stephen Hopkins, and starring Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Ruben Blades, María Conchita Alonso, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Peter Hall. It is the second installment of the Predator franchise, and sequel to 1987's Predator, with Kevin Peter Hall reprising the title role of the Predator.
Derry is a fictional town in the U.S. state of Maine that has served as the setting for a number of Stephen King's novels, novellas, and short stories, notably It. Derry first appeared in King's 1981 short story "The Bird and the Album" and has reappeared as recently as his 2011 novel 11/22/63.
The Dark Half is a horror novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1989. Publishers Weekly listed The Dark Half as the second-best-selling book of 1989 behind Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger. The novel was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 1993.
Roadwork is a thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, published in 1981 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the hardcover omnibus The Bachman Books. The story takes place in an unnamed city of the Midwestern United States in 1972–1974. Grieving over the death of his son and the disintegration of his marriage, a man is driven to mental instability when he learns that both his home and his workplace will be demolished to make way for an extension to an interstate highway. A film adaptation of the novel was announced in August 2019, with Pablo Trapero as director and Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti as producers.
The Bone Collector is a 1999 American crime thriller film directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. The film is based on the 1997 crime novel of the same name written by Jeffery Deaver, and focuses on a quadriplegic homicide detective and a newly recruited patrol officer investigating a series of murders in New York City.
"I'll be back" is a catchphrase associated with Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was made famous in the 1984 science fiction film The Terminator. On June 21, 2005, it was placed at No. 37 on the American Film Institute list AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes. Schwarzenegger uses the same line, or some variant of it, in many of his later films.
Thinner is a horror novel by American author Stephen King, published in 1984 by NAL under King's pseudonym Richard Bachman. The story centers on morbidly obese lawyer Billy Halleck, who, driving carelessly, kills an old Romani woman while she is crossing the street. He escapes legal punishment due to his connections, but the woman's 106-year-old father then curses Halleck to physically waste away, and the lawyer must find a way to undo the curse. King, who was overweight at the time of the novel's writing, created the novel’s outline following an annual medical examination.
Thinner is a 1996 American body horror film directed by Tom Holland and written by Michael McDowell and Holland. The film is based on Stephen King's 1984 novel of the same name and stars Robert John Burke, Joe Mantegna, Lucinda Jenney, Michael Constantine, Kari Wuhrer, and Bethany Joy Lenz. In the film, an obese lawyer who accidentally kills a Romani woman is cursed by the woman's father to rapidly lose weight.
Stay Hungry is a 1976 American comedy-drama film by director Bob Rafelson from a screenplay by Charles Gaines.
The Running Man is a 1987 American dystopian action film directed by Paul Michael Glaser and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, María Conchita Alonso, Richard Dawson, Yaphet Kotto, and Jesse Ventura. The film is set in a dystopian United States between 2017 and 2019, featuring a television show where convicted criminal "runners" must escape death at the hands of professional killers. It is loosely based on the 1982 novel of the same title written by Stephen King and published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.
Running Man may refer to:
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