Over at LitReactor, I made my case for The Long Walk. Probably not my favorite King novel, but objectively the best.
The Long Walk is a novel King released under his pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1979. It was the first novel he wrote (Carrie was the first one to be published), which is impressive, considering how good it is. He was still in college at the time. I’m not suggesting that King was never able to match his first effort; he wrote other masterpieces after this one. It’s just that this one inches over the finish line first.