YMMV / The Long Walk

• Fridge Horror:
  • It may be called "The Long Walk" but a minimum speed of 4 MPH takes at least a fast power walk to a light jog to reach. Considering the distance the Walkers traveled, it makes their effort that much more disturbing to consider.
    • However, if miles=kilometers in this AU, 4 ^km∕_h would be a reasonable walking speed (2.5 mph) and the vanguard (6 ^km∕_h) would be power-walking.
  • They are all volunteers, and there are thousands of them, so many that being actually picked is seen as a far chance even after passing the tests. Consider what you see through the whole book, and then think that thousands of people actually want to do that, despite having witnessed the full horror of the Walk for years, that's even scarier than the thought of people being forced to do so. Even worse, we see that some people apply on a whim and can still get picked, and either the government has a very dire sense of humor or the psychological tests are merely a facade and they just don't care about who those people actually are, only that they last about to give a good show.
  • All those whose names are drawn have a certain amount of time to withdraw from the Long Walk (and there are evidently no punitive consequences for doing so). Right up until the day before the Walk begins, any of the chosen entries can change their minds about participating—no harm, no foul. Of course, we are talking about teenage boys here, who aren't always capable of weighing the consequences of their actions...but what about their families and friends? Garraty's mother is begging him right up to the gate not to go through with it. It's possible that Stebbins was completely right when he said the reason they were all doing it was because they all wanted to die. That's perhaps the most horrible concept of all, that one hundred healthy young men are willingly throwing away their lives. Crapsack World indeed.
• Harsher in Hindsight: At one point, one of the Walkers floats the possibility that the winner's Prize might actually be to just be taken away and killed anyway. In the film adaptation of another Bachman book, this is exactly what happens.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: If you own the original Signet paperback, it's quite humorous to turn to the back pages and see some of Stephen King's work advertised among other paperbacks then being sold by Signet. Bachman's work was likewise being offered on the back pages of Stephen King's paperbacks.
• Ho Yay: Garraty and McVries. McVries starts off overtly flirty, and they save each other several times even though doing so makes winning harder, and at one point McVries offers to jerk Garraty off.
• Nightmare Fuel: And there's no shortage of it, either.
  • Barkovitch's suicide. He rips out his own throat.
  • Olson's Rasputinian Death. He is shot in the belly, falls down, and then gets up to continue walking. He is shot a few more times in the belly, causing his intestines to spill out, but he's still walking. The soldiers put a couple more bullets in him and then carry him away. Also, he dies screaming "I DID IT WRONG!"
  • Zuck leaving a trail of dried blood on the street behind him.
  • The unnamed boy, Walker 38, who gets his feet run over by the half-track. Acting as if he were capable of getting up and continuing to walk, the soldiers count down his time along with his warnings, and then shoot him. In other words, they let him suffer with his crushed legs for two whole minutes before putting him out of his misery.
  • The first Walker death, courtesy of Curley, lucky number seven. McVries identifies this as the moment when the reality of what it meant to be on the Walk finally hit him in the gut.
  • And the book's premise as a whole, since it twists the everloving hell out of The Determinator trope by strictly enforcing it.
• Spiritual Successor: Can be viewed as a companion piece to Bachman's The Running Man, which was released only 3 years later. The setting of the latter is more futuristic, but the thread of deadly entertainment is at the heart of both.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Pretty much every time a Walker gets a ticket, moreso when it's one of the core group. For Garraty himself, Baker's death was particularly rough.
    Garraty put his hands over his face and had to bend over to keep walking. The sobs ripped out of him and made him ache with a pain that was far beyond anything the Walk had been able to inflict.
    He hoped he wouldn’t hear the shots. But he did.
  • We spend much of the book anticipating the moment that Garraty will get to see his mother and his girlfriend Jan in Freeport. Once he finally gets there, he can't do more than hold their hands for a brief moment before he has to keep on walking.
• Woolseyism: The title of the French translation, Marche ou crève, summarizes the plot better than the original one: it literally means "walk or die" (though it also idiomatically means "do-or-die" or "sink or swim").

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