Subservient to no one

According to Stephen King, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers”, but The Running Man is a book that would have vastly benefited from some careful planning. This novel feels too much like an opportunity missed, in a number of ways. As the title alone suggests, what you’d expect to be a fast-paced, action-packed thriller is instead a wee bit plodding and pedestrian (more of a walking man). I wanted a tale in which the protagonist is attacked relentlessly from all sides, at all times: something fast and trilling and terrifying. The book is structured into one hundred sections, counting down form one hundred to zero (in fact that may be one-hundred-and-one sections in total). It’s the sort of literary device that might seem like a good idea in your head but in reality turns out to be tedious and cumbersome, and more of a hindrance than anything else. I couldn’t help thinking that much of what I was reading was mere filler to make up the numbers rather than important pl...