I really am obsessed with his first novel, The Long Walk, and is eager to discuss this novel. It is a very harrowing book. The rules were simple. Walk above four miles an hour without slowing. If you go under, you receive a warning. After three warnings, you will be shot and killed by the soldiers on mechanized carts that runs on tracks on either side of the walkers’ route. I read it at age twelve and was disturbed by the violent images of teenagers’ skulls and body parts being blown to bits by the government approved troops. Not only that, but the walkers suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorders and often tear into each other, not only physically, but psychologically. I believe this was the atmosphere during the Vietnam War drafts era of 1954 to 1973, inspiring the saying, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

To be honest, I am haunted most by one of the competitors’ story of his little brother. That competitor’s brother was promised an enema by his mother if he did not cry when dropping off his older brother for the competition. Must have been a hell of a conversation on the way there. Imagine having your little brother sell you out for a bit of bubbling soap suds pumping inside his butt. Grotesque and ugly, kind of funny not funny bit of anecdote. I never knew that there was another way to prevent children from acting out other than offering food as a positive reinforcement in cognitive psychology.

Even as a Deaf person who can’t be drafted, this story frightened me. I imagined my older brother and his best friend joining the competition only to see one of them shot down in the street before a cheering crowd. The competition is only reserved for athletes just like the army recruitment focus on kids who can play team sports. What’s worse is I might have gone crazy along with the crowd to cheer the bloody deaths of teenagers who do not really understand what they had signed up for until it was too late. There are others who are haunted by Stephen King’s first work.

Like James Smythe in his article in the Guardian Magazine issue in August of 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/30/rereading-stephen-king-the-long-walk. He readily identify with the teenagers when he read the book in his youth. After all, he doesn’t have a disability and is probably a capable player in team sports at his school.

The strange thing was I did not think of Stephen King’s The Long Walk while writing my first novel, “gather the weeds.” All I thought about was how people with disabilities have a hard time fitting in in high school like myself. I was lousy at sports, and tried to pass myself off as a hard of hearing. I thought I could read lips, but it is mostly struggling to guess what the hearing person said. And filling in the blanks with common knowledge of replies. I based the Deaf character struggling to interact with his hearing friends on me. But with such a technologically advanced hearing aid that could hear many things at a lower decibel. (Imagine my disappointment when the editor from Weird Tales wrote a note on my first chapter that this is a story about a selfish teenager who cares for nothing, but himself, and therefore doesn’t give the editor any reason to care about the rest of the story.) It was only after I had finished the novel, “gather the weeds” that I started thinking about “The Long Walk.”

I believe that Stephen King had already scared the kids who successfully navigated high school by being able to work together as a team, or compete against one another in sports, and able to maintain their C’s in classes ‘if only to get the teachers and the parents out of their asses’ as all smart mouthed students would said. Many of those walkers were well adjusted teenagers who on and off remind me of hearing kids in high school. But what of those kids who have a hard time making it on a certain level, when it comes to love relationships, friendships, sports, and classes in high school? Especially the teenagers with disabilities who go to high school and are limited to homerooms where other teenagers without any disability give those rooms a wide berth just because of the way they were born. I believe that my novel is for them. For those who are not well adjusted nor capable enough to be drafted into the nightmarish scenario of being killed for losing the competition. Only to be locked away from the bright shiny world filled with idealistic lives of the so called normal kids.