The mistake Stephen King waited 46 years to atone for: “More realistic”
In 1966, a youthful Stephen King wrote his first novel while attending the University of Maine. Unlike many King fans may assume, though, this novel wasn’t Carrie.
In ‘74, that terrifying tale of a high school student who uses her telekinetic powers to take revenge on her bullies and domineering mother became the first King novel to be published. However, it wasn’t the first novel the horror master actually wrote.
Instead, The Long Walk was the first time one of the most prolific authors in history actually completed a novel beginning to end, although it didn’t actually hit shelves until five years after Carrie in ‘79. It also wasn’t published under King’s name, as it came during the ‘Richard Bachman’ years, when King conducted an experiment to see if his books sold like gangbusters because of his brand name, or because they were actually good novels.
Between ‘77 and ‘84, King published five books as Bachman, including The Long Walk. In ‘85, though, his little ruse was rumbled by an intrepid bookshop worker in Washington DC, and King was forced to announce he and Bachman were one and the same. He felt this skewed the results of his experiment, because sales for the Bachman books shot up as soon as it was revealed they were actually penned by the ‘King of Horror’ in disguise.
Whatever the case, despite being the first novel he ever finished, The Long Walk has always been the most acclaimed Bachman work. Set in a dystopian future (King loves those), it tells the story of a gruelling annual contest held by a totalitarian regime in which 100 young men walk on an arranged route across the East Coast of the US. They must keep up a pace of four miles per hour at all times, but if they fall below this speed for three periods of 30 seconds, they are shot to death by the soldiers monitoring their progress. The winner of the contest is the last man standing, and his prize is anything he desires for the rest of his life.
Over the years, King fans have proclaimed The Long Walk as one of his most underrated novels. However, most of them have also tied themselves in knots about the veracity of one aspect of the story: namely, could anyone walk indefinitely at the brisk pace of four miles per hour? After all, while the military uses that speed for their timed ruck pace, and soldiers can average 12 miles walked in three hours, that’s only for a set period. Ask even the most hardened soldier to keep that pace up for days at a time, and if they were part of ‘The Long Walk’, their exhausted bodies would wind up with a bullet in the head.
So, was King making a point about the inherent futility of the contest? Is it rigged by the uncompromising regime in charge, who know full well that nobody can maintain that pace forever? Well, that’s one way to look at it, especially if you subscribe to the idea that the entire book is an allegory for the pointless struggle of the everyday rat race we’re all part of.
On the other hand, though, considering King also claims in the book that the average housewife walks 15 miles a day just going about her daily tasks, could he have simply made a mistake? Hilariously, King admitted in a 2025 Reddit AMA hyping up Francis Lawrence’s big screen adaptation of The Long Walk that, yes, he made a blunder by wildly overestimating the average walking pace of the human race. In fact, he even asked screenwriter JT Mollner to change the contest’s rules to three miles per hour for the film.
“At the time, I thought that was walking speed,” an honest King confessed, before noting that three miles per hour is much more realistic. Amusingly, though, he did offer an explanation for his error: back in the day, it wasn’t like he had easy access to a font of all knowledge to check that he’d crunched the numbers correctly. “In my own defence,” he wrote, “there was no internet or chatbots or any of that shit in 1967.”
