I’m 2 chapters into The Long Walk by Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King) and it makes me profoundly sad and uncomfortable. Stephen King is an extraordinary author I think, capable of painting beautiful pictures in the mind and truly able to tell a story as if you’re sitting with him. His stories, however, tend to be gruesome and painful and make you wonder about the deepest parts of being human. He questions politics and feelings and the basic essentials of what make us human. I think it can be hard to read about, especially in his more gruesome, more shameless books under the pen name Richard Bachman. Critics said that Richard Bachman was ”Stephen King without a conscious,” or at least, they did say that, before they found out they were the same person. That’s all there really is to say about it. Except that I don’t want to be sad right now.