The Running Man introduces us to Ben Richards, a young man living in 2025 who has been blacklisted and can’t find a job. Growing more desperate, with a sick infant daughter and a wife to take care of, he goes to the headquarters of the Games Network in hopes of landing a spot in one of their shows. While these shows offer a decent payment, they also offer disfigurement or death to the participants, all for the entertainment of the masses. Because of his intelligence, health, and blacklisted state Richards is slated to appear on The Running Man. He is sent out into the world with a twelve hour head start before hunters begin tracking him down. For every hour he stays alive, he earns $100. Viewers are encouraged to report sightings of him for a reward.

This is the world Stephen King envisioned way back in 1982. I’m not saying that our world has become what he envisioned, but it’s also not 2025 yet. In his world the air in cities is so bad that lung cancer is out of control. A few people live well, but the majority (the 99% ?) are so poor they work at jobs that compromise their health and subsist on subpar fast food, but everyone has FreeV to provide entertainment and doctored news while libraries and real knowledge are only for the elite. Something about all that hits a little close to home for me. Especially with American’s obsession with reality programming. Is it really such a big leap from Fear Factor to The Running Man? Maybe, maybe not.

Reading this, it’s easy to see why Stephen King has been such a vocal fan of The Hunger Games. A lot of the themes are the same, and both books convey the same feeling to the reader. While King’s book is darker, it’s also a more believable vision. He paints the image of decaying, still inhabited cities as accurately as a man who is standing inside one. The stark differences he creates between the haves and have-nots are easy to imagine. Richards is a desperate man, and the reader feels that with him. While he does things we would like to say we wouldn’t do, you’re rooting for him to do those things because it’s the only way to survive.

From start to finish, this book pulls you in and sets your head spinning. The chapters are fairly short and add to the urgency of the whole thing. You might as well be piggybacked on Richards because you are there with him. This might be King’s greatest gift as a writer. I would recommend this book to anyone else enjoying today’s boom of dystopian novels, because obviously King was thinking about it while half of today’s authors were still reading Doctor Suess. A word of warning though, don’t read the forward, because King spoils the ending in it, or at least he did in my version of the book!

Wow, Wow, Wow.

This book was ridiculously good. This review has to start with that because it was my immediate feeling while reading and after reading. Now, for the details.

I picked up Ashes with almost no idea what it was about. From the cover and the little I had heard about it, I knew it was something end of the worldy. This book does something that not a lot of the dystopian/end of the world books I have read do, it shows us how it ends, and that was terrifying and thrilling.

It opens with the main character Alex hiking off into the woods with the ashes of the dead parents. Turns out Alex has an inoperable brain tumor and will probably be as dead as her parents pretty soon anyway. It’s clear she’s considering suicide, but that’s not really the point of the hike. When an electromagnetic pulse blasts through the world, Alex finds herself alone with a grief stricken little girl named Ellie. Together they try to survive with few supplies and a growing number of odds against them. When they meet up with another young man, Tom, they become a group of three, still unsure if they are the only survivors. An enthralling fight for survival unfolds from there, pitting the group against other survivors, the coming winter, and people who have changed into something like zombies.

All the main characters in this book are amazingly fleshed out, they have their good moments and bad moments and read like people you know. Each of them is damaged in some way but possess an unwavering will to live. Alex is the sort of female lead that even Katniss from The Hunger Games wishes she could be (okay maybe that’s mean, maybe I mean Katniss from Mockingjay). Talk about strong! She depends on Tom to help them survive, but she never needs him to save her. These three are thrown together due to circumstances and it reads very real as Tom and Alex hide their pasts from each other, only letting the truth out in small pieces. Ellie is epically bratty and annoying at first, but that changes quickly as she bonds with Tom and Alex and realizes she needs to change due to circumstances.

Now talk about dark, this book is pretty damn honest about how cruddy things are going to be if this ever happens. People are straight up fighting for their lives and are often injured and Bick pulls no punches in her descriptions of the fighting and the wounds. The world she describes feels as real as if it were happening right outside your front door. And if Bick knows half as much about surviving as her characters do, then I hope I can find her when the world implodes.

Outside of the main characters, she’s spot on for how the mass of survivors would likely act in this situation. While a few do some together to form community, for those on the outside it is going to be a fight for survival. That fight would be bad enough if it was just a lack of resources and such, but add in the zombie-like creatures and it becomes a whole new level of fighting for your life. Every group in this book is in it for themselves, whether that means they hurt Alex and her friends or help them, you know they have their own agenda.

So as I said, awesome book, go get it today!