The Running Man cover art

The Running Man

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Running Man

By: Stephen King, Richard Bachman
Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

It's not just a game when you're running for your life.

Every night they tuned in to the nation's favourite prime-time TV game show. They all watched, from the sprawling slums to the security-obsessed enclaves of the rich. They all watched the ultimate live death game as the contestants tried to beat not the clock but annihilation at the hands of the Hunters.

Survive 30 days, and win the billion-dollar jackpot - that was the promise. But the odds were brutal and the game rigged. Best score so far was eight days. And now there was a new contestant, the latest running man, staking his life while a nation watched.

©1982 Richard Bachman (P)2010 Penguin Audio Suspense Thriller & Suspense Scary

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes cover art
Ruritanian Rogues: Volumes 1-3 cover art
Elantris (1 of 3) [Dramatized Adaptation] cover art
Space Team: The Collected Adventures, Volume 1 cover art
Red Rising cover art
Dungeon Crawler Carl cover art
I Am Legend cover art
The Dark Light of Day cover art
No Country for Old Men cover art
Refuge Omnibus Edition cover art
Doctor Who: Dead Air cover art
Earthcore (2 of 3) (Dramatized Adaptation) cover art
American Assassin cover art
Daemon cover art
Yesterday's Gone: Season One cover art
All stars
Most relevant
I'm a big fan of the Bachman books but these are a bit pricey as individuals books but that's the only negative.
the narrator delivers the story well and is convincing in different characters .
definitely worth a credit and don't let the film cloud your judgement.


even better on audio

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The Running Man was written and first published in 1982 by Stephen King’s alter ego Richard Bachman. There was no particular reason why I picked the book, other than that it was in my Audible library. By chance I mentioned this book a couple of days ago in another review. So I guess that makes two good reasons to pick it as the first book of 2017.

Just as a side note, with less than eight hours long The Running Man is one of the shorter books of his Greatness himself. It being quite a short meant that I finished the book in about a day and a half. Well, that was helped by the fact that it is a great story.

The future is here

We find ourself in the year 2025 and it seems Utopia is upon us. As in right now. It's so funny. Seeing that we are now in 2017 and with that a lot closer to 2025 than we are to 1982 (when the book was first published) it is interesting to see how people viewed our future back then. Although, we still have a few years to go, anext you never know what will happen in the next eight years.

Incidentally, the movie The Running Man, which was loosely based on he book, plays in 2017/19. I am more than glad that our current reality does not compute with the future pictures and imaginations of the past.

Anyways, Benjamin Stuart Richards sits at home in the impoverished part of Co-Op City town somewhere in the Midwest. His little daughter is sick and they don't have the money to get medicine for her. His wife is earning money for groceries turning tricks because he is blacklisted from working. Things are pretty dire in the Richards household.

America has turned into a totalitarian society, where lives don't count for much and the gap between rich and poor is larger than it has ever been. Bachman paints a rather dark and desolate picture of the future.

Games

Ben is watching game shows all day on the Free-V, large television screens that are installed in every household in the US of the future. TV has turned macabre; they show people compete for money to wrong way. Guys with heart disease take up treadmill challenges, swim with alligators and other such things. The tastes in entertainment have turned weird in 2025.

Richards decides to go onto on of those shows in order to get enough money to take his daughter to the doctor and get her the help she needs. It's the only way he can think of to get his hands on a few dollars and in his desperation he is willing to try his luck the only way left open to him.

This next part of the book is written in such an excellent way. The story is told completely out of Richards’ view and the reader is offered no explanation around that. Which makes you feel just as clues less and disoriented as the character himself. Which is brilliant if you ask me.

He heads out to the game centre and joins the endless queue of people. They all hope to be picked for one of the many shows. Richards goes through a series of tests, while watching other potential candidates being dropped one by one along the way. After every rounce those who made the cut are ushered on to the next part of the building. In the end there are only a handful of people left in his group.

The Running Man

Richards is chosen to be part in a show called The Running Man. In a nutshell, he will get a lot of money in exchange for certain death. The game show network will give him a 12 hour head start before sending out the professional hunters. These hunters have only one job: to find him and to kill him. He can use his money and go anywhere he wants. Leaved town, the country. Whatever works for him. The longer he survives he more money he gets. If he survives 31 days he wins the ultimate prise and gets to live.

However, the game keepers made clear to him that this is not going to happen. Still, he takes his chances and goes on the run. For his daughter.

Richards meets all kinds of people on his way across the country. He 3gets confronted with truths and realities of the time that he had closed his eyes to, as did so many people. There are people who help him and people who betray him.

The hunters draw closer all the time, but at least for some time Richards manages to outsmart and outrun them. He kills several in the process.

And so it continues until it all comes down to a big showdown at the end.

Each chapter of the book is part of a countdown, although towards the end the countdown gets faster all the time. It starts a minus 100 and counting. Until minus zero and counting.

Boom!

A dark future awaits us in 8 years

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Having watched the movie first and not even knowing about this little short I was pleasantly surprised. Great story.

Not what I expected, phew.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Excellent story, excellent performance, but as others have pointed out, in the intro to the book, where King talks about Bachman, the ending of the story is given away. Skip this if you don't want the ending ruined.

Enjoyable, but . .

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
One of the best from big Stevey king.
The ultimate fuck you story Ben richards just ain’t having it

Top stuff

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews