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Horror
Bird Box
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One hundred boys start walking. Keep four miles an hour or collect a warning; three warnings and you "get your ticket," which is the Long Walk's euphemism for a bullet. Last boy standing wins anything he wants for life. That is the entire premise of the first novel Stephen King ever wrote, published under the Bachman pseudonym decades before dystopian death-games became a genre, and with the film adaptation arriving in theaters, this lean nightmare is having the biggest moment of its long life. Kirby Heyborne's narration is the reason the audiobook is the version we would hand you.
Written when King was a teenager himself, The Long Walk contains the DNA of everything from The Hunger Games to every televised-death-game story since: the authoritarian America in the background, the crowd cheering the spectacle, children converted into content. But its method is stranger and crueler than its descendants, there is no arena, no strategy, no weapons, only walking, and the horror is pure attrition: blisters, cramps, sleep deprivation, and the arithmetic of boys failing one by one. The conversations between walkers, friendship under a death sentence, are the book's devastating core, and its ambiguous final page has been argued about for four decades.
Kirby Heyborne, a twenty-plus-time Earphones winner, gives a performance AudioFile described as sounding recorded in a single exhausted marathon, his youthful register fits the teenage cast, and he audibly fatigues with them, voice fraying as the miles accumulate. His Garraty is achingly human, his crowd noise and soldier cadences land with dread, and the deaths, each one, are given weight without melodrama. For a book whose engine is accumulating exhaustion, a narrator who walks it with you is the whole game.
Well narrated? Heyborne fatigues in real time with the walkers, a perfect match of performer and premise. King's leanest, cruelest early masterpiece, essential before the film, and the ancestor of half the dystopias on our shelf.
The Hunger Games, the descendant, and The Shining for King horror of the interior kind.
Kirby Heyborne narrates the Simon & Schuster Audio edition, a multi-award-winning performance praised for audibly wearying alongside the characters across the ten-plus hours.
Not directly, but it predates and clearly prefigures the genre: a dystopian state, teenagers in a televised death contest, a complicit audience. King wrote it decades earlier under the Richard Bachman pseudonym; Collins's series shares the territory rather than the story.
The violence is periodic but the cruelty is constant, the horror is exhaustion, dread, and the deaths of boys you have come to know. Many readers rank it among King's bleakest books despite minimal gore.
About 10 hours 44 minutes, roughly the length of the walk's first, best day, and it does not stop either.
You can hear The Long Walk free with an Audible trial. (Affiliate link, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.)
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