The Running Man

i read this in preparation to watch the film so i could listen to the new KINGCAST and follow along! and... i liked it! a good amount! it was a fun dystopian story with a future that's pretty recognizable to our own. a single narrative focus, which i'm really fond of. a pretty compelling (if sort of standard, boring, not NEW by any means) main character. a really good length! and a pretty tense format, what with the counting down throughout all of the chapters.

some complaints: i would have liked some more scenes centered around trying to evade the hunters, as opposed to the standoff format that came a little over halfway through. everything between ben starting out and him taking whatshername hostage was really tense, and while the rest of it was still pretty tense, i wanted a little more of the before parts.

also, king's prose just gets a little tiresome at some points. especially when it's about a COMPLETELY fictional world. it's easy to just completely lose track of what he's saying. sometimes i'm into that, but i feel like it just didn't really fit in with the character he created here? and one thing that always strikes me is it that feels like he writes narration like it's from the point of view of the character it's focusing on. and in this case, his weird rambling paragraphs didn't really fit. neither did the racism/homophobia, either. it's easier to excuse when it's characterizing a negative person (even though i don't particularly care for it then, either) but it just didn't make sense to me for ben, here.