The Running Man

The Running Man is a dystopian thriller by Stephen King, first published in 1982 as a paperback original under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It was collected in 1985 in the omnibus The Bachman Books, and it is set in a country where the media and much of the economy are run for the entertainment of the poor.

Ben Richards is unemployed, his daughter is ill, and the network controls both the news and the games. He is accepted as a contestant on a programme that turns a fugitive loose in the country with a bounty on him, and the novel follows him through cities and networks of people who either help or sell him, with the audience watching and the hunters closing in.

King wrote the book quickly and in the spare style of the Bachman novels, and its satire is aimed at television and at the way poverty is turned into content. It was one of the Bachman books that became widely known once the pseudonym was made public, and it remains one of the more directly political of his novels.