The Running Man, Richard Bachman/Stephen King
Ben Richards cannot watch his baby scream and struggle to breathe the toxic air anymore or stomach his wife selling herself anymore. The year is 2025 and his part of the world is a dystopian nightmare. Where the air is a thick soup and the decent jobs will render the most fertile men, sterile. So you choose, a meager existence or a family with a daily struggle for survival. Ben chose family. The choice has made him and angry, bitter and sarcastic man.
After, watching his daughter struggle to breathe, he does the only thing he thinks he can do. Join the end of a six block long line that leads to The Games building.
After 2 days of humiliating examinations and tests with hundreds of other desperate men, Richards makes the cut but not for just any game, it’s the big show, The Running Man! You don’t just return home injured, this game, they kill you or you win. And take a guess at how many have won.
Game play:
He and his family receive 100 New Dollars for every hour he remains free.
He gets a 12 hour head start and a $4800 advance, running money.
He is required to mail in 2 video tapes every 24 hours or he forfeits the money.
Every citizen that spots the runner and it results in his death, gets 1000 New Dollars.
Every citizen who aids and abets a runner is committing a crime, punishable by death. Not only are the runners hunted by citizens, they are also tracked by actual Hunters, employees of the Network. And as much as possible will be broadcast on National Free-Vee. Making sure to edit his words and photoshop him from a man out of choices to a brutal villain.
And if by some miracle Ben can last 30 days, the prize is a billion dollars. Along the way, he finds some things out about the Games Corporation and the probable real reason for the games, the truth about the chronic illness of the population and the cost of capitalism. When, after a traumatizing desperate run, he is given an offer he can’t refuse, he will discover this nightmare could last forever and what it’ll cost him.
Ben Richards is smart but can he outplay the people who trade in turning human suffering and desperation into entertainment, and win? Can he actually beat them at their own game?
]]>
The Talisman by Stephen King & Peter Straub
Twelve year old, Jack and his mother, Lily, retire B Movie Queen are running from Uncle Morgan aka Jack's Dad's business partner. See he wants something, something very valuable, the most valuable thing in the world, in fact, all of them. And Jack is one of the few people in all the world's who can even get near it. And since Morgan's greed knows know bounds, he will do what he has too and already has, to get what he wants.
Jack understands something is very wrong and with a new friend, Speedy, an old blues man, he comes to understand what he must do. Which means going back where it all started, where he and his mother ran from, across the country. And he must head there alone and on foot but is assured that he will have plenty of help along the way. But he must 'flip' and travel a special way, in a special place, The Territories. It will be faster and he will learn more about what's at stake as he fails.
Along the way he will experience magic and monsters, predators of every kind. He will gain and lose friends and death follows him the entire way. He's being hunted by everything from Man eating trees, pedophilic goat men, psychopathic human traffickers and an array of mutated animal/man hybrids but this is his destiny. He will visit one Hell after another and as his friends and foes fall, he gets closer to either his success or failure, either way, it will impact all of the worlds.
This is a phenomenal adventure story that's full of heart ache and horror. It is one of the many branches of Stephen King's universe. It's also the prequel to Black House and has some parallels in the Dark a Tower Series. If you like a long and epic story, I recommend this one.
]]>