The Long Walk

No. The Long Walk was published in 1979 as Richard Bachman, the second Bachman book. King wrote the novel as a college student in 1966-67 and it is one of his earliest complete manuscripts.

One hundred boys begin walking south from the Maine-Canada border. They must maintain a speed of at least four miles per hour. Each time a walker drops below that speed, he receives a warning. After three warnings, if he drops below speed again—or falls, or stops—he is shot by soldiers walking alongside the column. The last boy walking wins anything he wants.

King has said the Walk is an allegory for whatever process grinds young men down—war, poverty, ambition, the structures of society that demand endless performance. The boys have all volunteered for reasons they believe are good; the novel watches those reasons erode under the reality of what they've entered. It is one of King's most sustained studies of masculinity under pressure.

Yes. After decades in development, a film adaptation directed by Francis Lawrence, with a screenplay by JT Mollner, was released on September 12, 2025. It stars Cooper Hoffman as Ray Garraty, David Jonsson as Peter McVries, and Mark Hamill as the Major.

This is a standalone novel, though it was originally published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman and later collected in an omnibus volume titled The Bachman Books.

This was the first novel the author ever wrote, drafted while he was a college student in the mid-sixties, years before his first published work reached the public.