The Complete Stephen King Universe

by Stanley Wiater

  MARY DAWES: A local woman who has lived her life through her husband, Barton Dawes. She has given birth to two children by him, both with tragic results. The first was born dead, while the second, Charlie, dies from an inoperable brain tumor. She leaves him when she realizes that he is too inflexible to cope with any further hard blows from life. Mary Dawes’s current whereabouts are unknown.

  CHARLIE DAWES: The young son of Barton and Mary Dawes, Charlie Dawes dies of a brain tumor—a cancerous growth about the size of a walnut, according to his doctor—leaving his parents childless and alone. Before he kills himself, Barton Dawes frequently holds imaginary “conversations” with his dead boy.

  OLIVIA BRENNER: A native of Portland, Maine, Olivia is a twentyone-year-old woman who is hitchhiking to Las Vegas when Barton Dawes gives her a lift. Although he deeply regrets the act later, Barton gives in to the temptation and sleeps with the attractive young stranger. He later uses monies from the sale of his home to set up a trust fund for her. She apparently uses it to get her life together and enrolls in business school, an achievement Dawes will never live to see.

  SAL MAGLIORE: A local criminal who uses a used car lot as a cover for his extralegal activities, Sal is an obese, vulgar, and unattractive individual who has the ability to get anything for anyone—for the right price. Although he at first refuses to sell Barton Dawes the high explosives he asks for, he later decides to do so out of a grudging respect for him. Sal realizes that Dawes, crazed though he clearly must be, is operating out of his own code of honor. As such, the criminal finds himself perversely drawn to the doomed man, despite his better judgment.

  DAVE ALBERT: A reporter for the local television station WHLM who first encounters Barton when they both attend the official groundbreaking for the highway extension. By a quirk of fate, Albert is also the first journalist on the scene when Dawes makes his last stand in his home. After giving the reporter an exclusive, Barton advises him to leave the scene before it is too late. Dawes tells the reporter he’ll probably earn the Pulitzer Prize for being in the right place at the right time, and as fate would have it, that’s precisely what happens.

  THE BLUE RIBBON LAUNDRY: This is the small family business that Barton Dawes has been working for his entire life, before it is taken over by a company that no longer has any concern for anything but the bottom line.

  ROADWORK: TRIVIA

  • The Blue Ribbon Laundry chain figures prominently in the short story “The Mangler,” from Night Shift. Carrie White’s mother, Margaret, also worked for the chain.

  • On the original paperback edition of Roadwork, the main character is misidentified on the back cover copy as George Bart Dawes.

  • Roadwork is the only Bachman novel to have a subtitle (“A Novel of the First Energy Crisis”), but it was not carried over for the later omnibus editions.

  58

  THE RUNNING MAN

  (1982)

  An earnest attempt at writing a spare, fast-paced novel squarely set in the science fiction genre, The Running Man was also Stephen King’s second work—after The Long Walk (1979)—to be directly inspired by television game shows.

  Indeed, in the epigram that opens Chapter 4 of The Long Walk, game show creator Chuck Barris is quoted as saying: “The ultimate game show would be one where the losing contestant was killed.” Clearly, that statement was the trigger for this grim satire of a North American police state where there is no hope for the masses—except to watch and bet on the ultraviolent games shown continuously on “Free-Vee.” As was also the case with The Long Walk, the setting here is an even more corrupt vision of an ultraconservative police state—an “Amerika” spelled with a fascist “k.”

  The book is set in the year 2025, when the most popular game show on the planet is The Running Man. It is also the most deadly: if a contestant successfully eludes the police and the specially trained government Hunters for thirty days, he wins the game. Of course, no one has long enough to collect the staggering one-billion-dollar prize.

  But Ben Richards (whose name might be a nod to the comic book characters Ben Grimm and Reed Richards of Fantastic Four fame), a sullen outsider whose stubborn streak of independence and relative high intelligence keep him from accepting the status quo, decides to take that suicidal risk and enters The Running Man. He feels he has no other options: he is chronically unemployed, his wife has to work occasionally as a prostitute to support the family, and their only child may die unless they get the necessary finances to secure the proper medical care.

  Of course, the game is rigged, and it’s all but impossible for anyone to last for more than a few harrowing days. Portrayed as a killer and a thief to millions of television watchers by the program’s unscrupulous producers, Richards finds the odds stacked against him. Now perceived as a ruthless criminal, it seems only a matter of time before he is spotted by one of his fellow citizens and turned in for a monetary reward.

  With the aid of the members of a small underground movement (seemingly the only ones aware of how the Establishment is poisoning the very air the common citizens must breathe), Richards manages to stay one step ahead of the Hunters, at one point kidnapping a wealthy citizen to deter the police from firing upon his car. After a harrowing cross-country chase, he ends up at an airfield in Derry, Maine. Pretending he has a bomb, he hijacks an aircraft and has it flown toward the city where the Games Headquarters is situated.

  In the meantime, the powerful men who run the game decide that it would be better for the government if, instead of killing Richards, they fake his demise and give him a fresh identity and a new job for which he would be perfectly suited—as their new Chief Hunter. They make their proposal to him, but make the tactical error of informing him that his wife and child have been murdered by “vandals.” Devastated, Richards decides to strike back at his tormentors by crashing the huge aircraft directly into their headquarters (a plot development that seems eerily prophetic in light of the events of 9/11). Hopefully, the act might inspire the masses to rise up against their oppressors. Then again, maybe no one will even notice.

  According to King’s own note in The Bachman Books omnibus, issued in 1985, “The Running Man, for instance, was written during a period of seventy-two hours with virtually no changes.” It was conceived over a long weekend stint in 1971, shortly after writing the first draft of Carrie. King believed at the time that The Running Man was a more commercial prospect than his tale of a high school misfit endowed with paranormal abilities. He submitted it to both Doubleday & Co. and Ace Books (a leading paperback publisher of science fiction and fantasy), and both promptly passed on it.

  The reasons for the rejection may have had as much to do with the dark tone of the novel as with the quality of the writing itself. The novel is unrelentingly bleak—Ben Richards is presented as a doomed figure, someone who is selected from the masses to provide a few hours of entertainment on “Free-Vee” and then be trashed. Richards knows he is a marked man, and the way he deals with the individuals who are hunting him can only be resolved in one of two ways: either through their violent termination or his own.

  Although written several years after The Long Walk, The Running Man shares many themes with that novel. Both Ben Richards and Ray Garraty of The Long Walk enter a government-controlled game in which they both appreciate from the outset that they have a very small chance of winning—or surviving. Both men, when they realize they are going to win, no longer care about the outcome. In spite of the great personal ordeal, their ultimate fate is meaningless. Just because you survive the Long Walk or The Running Man doesn’t mean you’re safe. Life still remains horribly unfair—for most, hopelessness remains the status quo.

  In both novels, King presents us with grim dystopian societies where, no matter what the final scorecard might say, there are never any real victors. You might survive the games imposed upon you by the government, but you will still never make any lasting mark or change upon the rest of the world. That doesn’t mean, however, that the battle
is not worth fighting—in the Stephen King Universe, there will always be a Ray Garraty or Ben Richards who will try to overcome seemingly impossible odds.

  THE RUNNING MAN: PRIMARY SUBJECTS

  BEN RICHARDS: The longest-surviving contestant to ever play the national game The Running Man. Twenty-eight years old, he has no family beyond his wife and child. Essentially a loner, he has never believed in any causes or shown allegiance to any political movement or cause. Never comfortable with authority, he was fired from his last six jobs due to gross insubordination.

  Tired of being stuck in abject poverty, hoping to be able to afford the medicine his child needs for her debilitating illness, he takes the suicidal risk of becoming a contestant on the government-sponsored show The Running Man.

  While traveling across the country in the run of his life, Richards realizes how the government is purposely keeping the majority of the population downtrodden and ill. After hijacking an airplane, he purposely directs the craft into the Games Building in Co-Op City, giving his life to make his first and last political stand.

  SHEILA RICHARDS: The wife of Ben Richards, she is among the millions of stricken citizens kept in poverty by the government. Just as Richards’s mother had done, she is often forced to sell her body to help put food on the table. She is murdered by persons unknown shortly after her husband begins his stint on The Running Man.

  CATHY RICHARDS: The eighteen-month-old infant child of Ben and Sheila Richards, she is very ill with the flu. Because medicine is prohibitively expensive, her father becomes a contestant on The Running Man to obtain the funds to purchase the necessary drugs. She is murdered with her mother by persons unknown, though these nameless intruders may in fact have been under the employ of the Games Authority.

  DAN KILLIAN: The executive producer of The Running Man, he is the puppetmaster, the man who controls everything that goes out over the airwaves. Ben Richards hates him from the moment they meet. Killian later tries to convince him to stay on as the new Chief Hunter, but his offer is refused. Killian presumably dies when the aircraft carrying Richards crashes directly into the Games Building.

  BOBBY THOMPSON: The on-air host and emcee of The Running Man, it is his job to incite the studio audience—and the millions of people watching in their homes—to turn against Ben Richards. He dies in the resulting explosion and fire caused when Richards’s aircraft smashes into the Games Building.

  EVAN McCONE: The unflappable head of the Hunters, he is aboard the aircraft that Richards uses against the Games Authority. Before he dies, he learns that the Authority is quite willing to let Richards kill him and become the new Chief Hunter. He expires in a shoot-out with Richards on the plane, even though Ben has no intention of ever taking his place on The Running Man.

  ELTON PARRAKIS: An automatic vending machine serviceman, he is instrumental in assisting Ben Richards in his cross-country flight. Part of an underground movement trying to inform the public how the government is killing them with unchecked environmental pollution, he is shot to death by the police after a car chase.

  AMELIA WILLIAMS: The well-to-do woman whom Ben Richards kidnaps near the end of his fateful journey. Because she is a clearly a member of the upper class, the police and those hunting Richards are afraid to eliminate him while she remains his prisoner. Also, her innocent death would be watched by millions on the global television system, and would not be good for ratings. Although she is terrified by Richards and all that he represents, Amelia inexplicably finds herself going along with the desperate man’s requests. Amelia survives Richards’s suicidal act of defiance when her captor allows her to parachute from the plane shortly before impact.

  THE RUNNING MAN: ADAPTATIONS

  Released in 1987, the film version of The Running Man was the first screen adaptation of a Richard Bachman novel. King reportedly insisted that the credits on the movie reflect that fact—“based on the novel by Richard Bachman”—despite the fact that the world already clearly knew that he was the true author of the novel. It is interesting to note, though, that the movie rights to the paperback original were purchased before it was known that King was in fact Bachman.

  In terms of the basic plot, the movie is faithful to the source material: if Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his reluctant companion Amber (Maria Conchita Alonso) can escape a band of professional Stalkers, he will win the grand prize on the planet’s most popular television game show, hosted by the flamboyant Damon Killian (Richard Dawson). It’s yet another, futuristic version of the classic short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” with a man on the run from a pack of vicious hunters.

  Of course, Schwarzenegger’s presence influenced the final version, as the story was extensively revamped to serve as a vehicle for the international action star. Rather than a sullen, desperate man trying to win the merciless competition to purchase medicine for his sick child, Ben Richards is now a rogue policeman who has been betrayed by the corrupt government. There really isn’t much suspense, as viewers are never really in doubt that Richards will ultimately triumph in the end. Schwarzenegger capitalizes on the largerthan-life roles he had already played in The Terminator (1984) and Commando (1985). The movie even showcases the brutal one-liners that were to become a signature part of his career in action movies.

  To increase the odds against Richards, screenwriter Stephen E. de Souza created a group of professional hit men—cartoonlike villains called “Stalkers”—for him to dispatch in imaginative and darkly humorous ways. The actors in these bizarre roles are appropriately larger than life: professional wrestlers Jesse “the Body” Ventura and Professor Toru Tanaka, and athleteturned-actor Jim Brown, among others. Richard Dawson—himself a longtime television game show personality—clearly has the most fun as the man who controls these hit men, the ruthless yet jovial game show host Killian.

  In the end, this extremely violent, R-rated feature shares little in common with the book other than the original title and basic concept. Perhaps Stephen King was wise to let the world remember it as a movie based on an early work by Richard Bachman.

  THE RUNNING MAN: TRIVIA

  • The Running Man is the only novel by Richard Bachman not to carry a dedication.

  59

  THINNER

  (1984)

  As noted in the introduction to this section, the public at large learned of King’s Richard Bachman pseudonym shortly after the publication of this novel in the fall of 1984. Ironically, King had at one point considered issuing the book under his own name. This is not surprising in hindsight, given that Thinner reads very much like an archetypal Stephen King novel.

  Thinner remains true to the spirit of previous Bachman titles in that it is exceedingly bleak and downbeat. None of the characters are particularly likable, and their ultimate fates are not particularly pleasant. From the very first page there is a sense of dread, of inevitability, that gives the reader the immediate impression that the author wants to show us humanity at its worst and most vengeful. Thinner grapples with the concepts of guilt, responsibility, justice, and retribution. If “revenge is a dish best eaten cold,” then nearly all the characters in Thinner get their fill.

  Billy Halleck is a successful attorney who resides in suburban Connecticut and practices law in New York City. At age thirty-six, he has it all: a great career, a pretty wife, and a wonderful daughter. His one flaw is that he enjoys eating too much—he is fifty pounds overweight, and has been warned by his doctor that he risks a heart attack if he doesn’t cut back a little.

  Billy’s girth ceases to be an issue after he accidentally hits and kills an old Gypsy woman, Susanna Lemke, with his car. Taking advantage of his good standing in the community, and of his close ties to the local police and judge, he gets off with the proverbial slap on the wrist. Enraged by this miscarriage of justice, the Gypsy woman’s father, a Gypsy elder named Taduz Lemke, places a curse on Billy as he is leaving the courthouse, whispering a single word:

  “Thinner.”

  From that da
y forward, Billy loses two pounds every day. At first overjoyed, he later turns fearful, as it appears that he can do nothing to reverse the process. Judge Cary Rossington and Police Chief Hopley, who assisted Billy in avoiding punishment in the death of Susanna Lemke, are also victims of Gypsy curses, suffering terribly from unknown and incurable afflictions that are rapidly disfiguring their bodies. These curses are, of course, metaphors for the many terrifying maladies that can inflict themselves upon us at any time in our lives: cancer, heart disease, even mental illness.

  The fact that nearly two out of every three Americans suffers from a weight problem makes Billy Halleck’s dilemma extremely easy to relate to. The real-life horror of losing too much weight—anorexia nervosa—was a psychological disorder just becoming known to the general public at the time of the book’s initial publication. The cruel irony presented in Thinner is that although being overweight can kill you, being underweight can do the same.

  King delights in showing us the numerous ironies inherent in the lives of these characters. He explores the thin line between hate and love, between justice and vengeance, between denying and accepting responsibility. With the exception of the ruthless gangster Richard Ginelli, a former client whom Billy hires to put “the curse of the white man from town” on Taduz Lemke and his extended family of Gypsies, none of the characters in Thinner choose to accept responsibility for their actions. Unlike Billy, Ginelli has no problem with facing up to the possibility that his own illegal actions might lead to his violent death. What is important to him is that he is true to his own personal moral code, and that he live up to his promises.