Early King short stories written under Psudonym Richard Backman. I enjoyed these stories as they are not strictly horror as the rest of his books are.

When I asked my hubby to recommend a Stephen King book to send to Owlet in the Netherlands as a trade for her Life According to Garp he recommended this as he finds early King much better than his later works.

Release planned for Monday, January 05, 2004 at Trade in traded through the mail, Traded to BookCrosser Controlled Releases.

Traded with Owlet for Life According to Garp.

Wow! 865 pages of horror! Thank you soooo much, weebly and hubby of weebly, the book looks pretty impressive and it even includes The Long Walk, a story I've been wanted to read eversince I read a review about it here on bookcrossing! Thank you thank you thank you. This book is going on my huge Mt. TBR, don't know yet when I'll have time to read it, but I'll keep you updated when I do.

By the way, did I say thank you? ;-)

I *finally* picked up this huge book to read one of the stories (sorry weebly, for waiting soooo long...). I read the first one, Rage, about a boy who holds his class hostage after killing two of the teachers.
The end was a bit surprising, I didn’t expect them to all pounce on Ted. I don't know, I expected him to be able to walk away with it in a way. All in all, it was nice to have finally read a Stephen King, even though it was no horror, as I thought it would be. This was more thriller-like, quite likeable.

I will read the rest of the stories eventually, but not quite soon, I want to alternate with other (kinds of) books. Thanks again, weebly!

Well, I just read the second story, The Long Walk... What an incredible story! Chilling, left me with goose bumps. I guess that''s what a real Stephen King story is. It''s the story about 100 young boys, having to walk for as long as possible at a certain speed. Each time they walk under that speed, they get a warning and after three warnings... the bullet. They are actually shot to death, as one of the boys say: "the guns don''t go "pop" and out comes a red flag".

The terrifying thing is that people are actually watching it and cheering when one of the boys gets killed. The death of a young man is considered to be normal, and entertainment. The story is told from the perspective of one of the boys, Ray Garraty, and his feelings, emotions and physical reactions to the deadly Long Walk. King describes in detail how the boys fall apart, both psychologically as physically, with each step.

The story was a quick read (although it took me quite some days, because I don''t find much time to read anymore) and will have me thinking for a long time. This is definitely one of the more intriguing stories I''ve read this year!

I didn't find the third story, Roadwork, quite that interesting. I kept waiting for some horrible turning of the story, which I think is a King feature, but it just didn't happen. The story did build up to some sort of a climax, which in the end wasn't that exciting. It wasn't a really bad story, but simply not what I was expecting.
Now, one more story to read!

There it is, the last review for the last of the four stories, 5 years after receiving the book, LOL (that's more than 1 year per story, hihi).

I think I read The Running Man even faster than The Long Walk. This is again a story about a deadly game. We are somewhere in the 2030's and the entertainment business is ruling the USA. Everybody has a Free-Vee, a free television where only games appear. One of the games, Treadmill to Bucks, is for people with cardiac problems who have to stay as long as possible on a treadmill, while answering questions. Everytime they give a wrong answer, the treadmill goes faster and this goes on until the person has a heart attack. There are all kinds of horrific games like that, with the most popular being The Running Man, where a man is actually hunted to death. He (or rather, his family) earns 100 dollars for every hour he stays alive and 1 billion dollar if he survives for 30 days.

The protagonist, Ben Richards, has a little daughter with pneumonia, but is unemployed and can't afford to buy medicine for her. So, he registeres and gets selected for The Running Man. What follows is a fascinating story about a man on the run. I won't tell much more, the next reader will probably read fast enough to find out soon enough; I found the book unputdownable, had to read it as fast as I could :-)

I found it to be in about the same line as The Long Walk, fascinating and horrifying. The idea that people can actually make up this kind of entertainment is very disturbing.

So, thank you very much, weebly, for sending me this introduction to Stephen King!! I already found the next reader; the boyfriend of a colleague of mine likes books by King, but she didn't think he read his earlier work, so here goes. I don't think he's a bookcrosser, but who knows, maybe he'll still leave a journal entry...
Bye bye book!

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Giving this to a colleague of mine, who will pass it on to her boyfriend. Enjoy the read!

Left the book on one of the tables in the lounge area.

Loved Rage and The Running Man!