Rating: 5 out of 5 maggots and pals.

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This is a pulp thriller, really, and in the finest tradition of it. Sometimes people call a book pulp and use it as a synonym for toilet paper, but just like any genre, there is good pulp (admittedly not a huge amount) and bad pulp (yes, a great big gulp of it). Pulp, at its best, is fast-paced, gritty, unputdownable, with goodies and baddies but some level of ambiguity about how good a goodie can really be in such a bad world. No, it’s not literary fiction, and TRM doesn’t have the psychological depth and finesse of The Shining, but it’s fantastic in a whole different way.

Maybe it’s not for everyone, because no genre of novel is. But this tight, fast thriller is pulp at its very best, and rivals The Long Walk for King-as-Bachman’s best.

Review (i.e. Who’d have thought the old man to have had so many spoilers in him?)

King’s (early) Bachman works are threaded together by a common theme: your government doesn’t care about you. If that statement were a crown, The Running Man would be a gigantic shiny jewel, right bang in the middle of the forehead band.

There’s an interesting fusion between megacorps and the government that is never fully explained, but in essence – the people who create TV are the government, and vice-versa. Television is little more than a way to keep the middle-class loathing the poor, the working-class too dead-eyed to revolt and the upper-class swirling brandy around in great big glasses, laughing through their evil posh noses like tickled horses. Is it a little ham-fisted at times? Sure; sometimes it even gets a little porcine right up the forearm. But you’re not here for subtlety. Again, this isn’t literary fiction; you’re getting steak and chips, not foam essence of magnolia on a pillow of charred whiskers. But it’s steak and chips cooked very, very deliciously. Sometimes big messages hit you best when they’re written on a fist, rather than a feather.

King’s disdain for TV (at the time he wrote it; I suspect he’s less dismissive of it in Star Trek: The Netflix Generation) comes through loud and clear here, from the manipulation of its output to accordingly manipulate its audience, to the shuddering great difference between what you see on the screen, compared to what goes on behind it. It’s something he discussed in Danse Macabre. For him, the gameshows on display represent the ultimate depravity of TV, and one that is not a far cry from what we see today. Poor people humiliated and dehumanised for the potential reward of some money to help them survive in a rigged hypercapitalist system – we might not have Treadmill for Bucks, the show where people with heart conditions run themselves to death, but we’ve sure had Benefits Street and Big Brother.

One aspect that King didn’t predict here is the compounding factor of fame – meaning people will demean themselves not just for money, but to be known as that person who demeaned themselves. But give the guy a break; he was writing this in 1981, nearly twenty years before Big Brother first aired.

King apparently shot through this book in a week, and that same vicious pace of creation is upheld in its reading – it goes from beat to beat with the speed and furore of a Mexican jumping bean on a snare drum. You could power through it in a single sitting, and that might even be the best way to read it – running right alongside Richards.

There are a couple of uncomfortable moments in it. On his way into the Games Commission, he is uncomfortably sexist towards some of the women. But this is core to his character – not that he’s sexist, but that he has a deep sense of loathing towards anyone who thinks they’re better than him, or in a position of authority over him. He’s been rendered powerless by his society, and his response is to search for weakness in his oppressors and, when he finds it, to whack his fist on that button as hard as possible. He says things that are sexist, not because he is sexist (although he probably is on various levels) but in order to wound somebody wielding power over him. For the same reasons, he undermines people’s masculinities, plays on race, and jabs at people’s moral consciences, all the way throughout the book. These responses are the reason he’s selected for TRM in the first place – he is antiauthoritarian first, and everything else second.

Finally, a word on the film – it’s obviously nothing even slightly like the book. Which isn’t to say the film isn’t enjoyable in its own bicep-brandishing nonsensical way, just that it’s not a reflection of it. Apparently Edgar Wright is directing a new version soon, and I sincerely hope it’s more faithful to the book, because it really feels like it would lend itself to the screen perfectly. I also hope they keep the book’s ending in – I know that after September 11 2001, it’s not a popular idea to show planes crashing into New York City towers, but it is the perfect full-circle ending for this story, and if anything it might even give the film more pathos.