With the recent release of The Running Man directed by Edgar Wright and written by Wright and Michael Bacall, I thought it would be the perfect time to read the book for the first time. Seems like the Schwarzenegger movie I grew up watching back in the 90s was on TBS at least once a week, and while I knew it was based on Stephen King’s novel (written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) I found after reading the book that the 1987 movie diverges significantly from the source material.
For starters, the Ben Richards of Bachman’s world seems less like Mr. Universe, and more like a cigarette-smoking, Yippee Ki‐Yaying John McClane who’s been crushed by a broken system and shoved into the deadliest game show ever created (which I found a little ironic since Bruce Willis and Arnie were frenemies-slash-action-hero rivals throughout the 80s).
One thing that makes The Running Man so underrated is how shockingly ahead of its time it was. Set 43 years ahead of its publication in the year 2025, King paints a future where entertainment and exploitation are basically the same thing; where the poor get fed into the machine controlled by the government-backed Games Commission for the sole purpose of everyone else’s amusement.
And while there isn’t a cell phone in sight, Free-Vee televisions are on every corner, with hit gameshows like Swim the Crocodiles, Run For Your Guns, and my personal favorite Treadmill to Bucks broadcast 24/7. King anticipated a world obsessed with reality-TV long before it existed, a media landscape where ratings dictate morality, and a society numbed by nonstop screens and manufactured outrage (social media, anyone?).
There’s even a little creative Photoshop in there, with producers working for The Games Network altering images of Richards’ wife to portray her, in King’s words, like “a vapid slattern,” drawing hateful boos from the live audience prior to Richards’ emotionally intense release into the wild (twelve-hour head start!).
Can Ben Richards win the ultimate game of life and death?
Richards is no doubt a desperate man competing in a life-and-death game where the odds are stacked against him, and throughout the book he is forced to outthink (not out-muscle—here’s looking at you, Arnold) the hired government assassins along with an entire bloodthirsty nation trying to kill him. The motivation? Verified sightings bring one hundred New Dollars. A sighting that results in a kill brings one thousand New Dollars.
In world where poverty is high and hope is at an all-time low, New Dollars are worth their weight in gold. And that makes them worth killing for.
It’s worth noting that if you grew up watching the Schwarzenegger flick, the new cinematic adaptation has been described in Wright’s words as more of a road-survival movie, as opposed to the confined arena that Runners had to navigate in the ’87 classic. This version stays truer to the Bachman novel, taking readers from the fictional Co-Op City to Boston, Portland (Maine), and beyond in an everyman’s desperate race for survival.
Another thing I love about The Running Man is how fast it reads. Chapter One begins at “… Minus 100 and COUNTING …” and ends at 000, with some of the most succinct, edge-of-your-seat scenes I’ve ever read. The pacing never lets up, with chapter lengths ranging from five-to-six pages all the way down to a handful of sentences. It’s almost like King was trying to outrun his own typewriter.
Bachman’s voice is also a slight turn from King’s earlier work under his own name; one that is colder, meaner, and downright furious at times. Richards is determined to win the game and/or crash the system in the process, and he raises many-a middle finger to The Man (AKA Dan Killian & Co.) throughout the race toward $1 billion New Dollars—that is, if he can last for a full 30 days without losing his head in the process.
I found The Running Man to be one of the tightest, grittiest novels I’ve read in a long time, and if you love dystopian sci-fi thrillers AND you’re a Stephen King fan then I highly recommend checking this one out. There’s even a few mentions of Derry, Maine near the end, which happens to be the first reference King made to the fictional town in a full-length novel (the first mention was in the short story “The Bird and the Album” which later folded into IT). Thought that was a cool little nugget King fans would appreciate.
If you love dark and angry dystopian fiction that reads at a mile a minute, then The Running Man deserves a spot high on your list. It’s easily one of King’s most underrated works, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the writers of the new 2025 flick decided to wrap up the new adaptation—hopefully with the same energy that’s faithful to the source material.
Because the book ending, as we Elder Millennials would say, was DA BOMB.
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