The Long Walk is one of the famed "Bachman Books", novels that King wrote before he was published in his own name, and that were only published (under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) in the wake of the success of Salem's Lot. In fact, The Long Walk is the earliest of all King's books, written when he was just 18. I've previously talked about Rage, his second published novel, and one that I think is pretty easy to see as juvenilia. That's not to say it's bad, per se: just that the ideas in it, the execution of it, aren't a patch on where King's skills would push him in later novels. You'd expect The Long Walk to fall foul of the same youthful errors, but, somehow, it transcends them. I count this book as among King's finest works: a horrifying piece of not-horror that's as powerful today as it was when it was released in 1979. There are traces of The Long Walk in a great number of contemporary young adult novels – its DNA is all over The Hunger Games, for example – but, unlike so many of the books it has influenced, The Long Walk is actually scary; threatening and unsettling. Given the allegorical nature of the novel's content, so it should be.

The premise: 100 teenage boys are picked from a televised draft lottery by a despotic alternate-history version of the US army, and told to walk until they stop. If they drop below four miles an hour they get a warning. Three warnings and they're shot dead. Of the 100 who start the walk, only one survives, and he is granted the ultimate prize: anything he wants for the rest of his life. And that's it. There's no big bad hiding in the shadows (unless you count the Major, a modern-day fascistic twist on an Uncle Sam figure who organises the event and rallies the boys to walk), no huge narrative twist, no deus ex machina. It's a book that starts with 100 characters who, slowly but surely, are whittled down to one. Sometimes it happens in bursts of vivid description, their infractions logged and detailed, the bullets ringing out from the pages; sometimes it happens via word of mouth, as the boys who are left alive gossip about their dwindling numbers. But you know that 99 of these boys are going to die, and then the book will end. There's no reason given for why the Walk happens, not really. It's referred to as "the national sport", and that's a large chunk of it: entertainment, watched by millions on television. But that's not all, and it's definitely not enough.

The boy we readers want to win is 16-year-old Ray Garraty. He's the main character, our eyes on the Walk. Garraty has a mother and a girlfriend (whom he daydreams of: virginal lusting for whatever she's got underneath her sweater), and he wants to survive. He doesn't know why he's doing the Walk really: only that, when his number was called and he was given the chance to back out, he didn't. Greed and the promise of glory took him that far, and they would be the things that would carry him to the end of the race: that's Garraty's logic. He meets the other boys for the first time as they wait on the start line, and we discover that they all have their motivations. For some, it's love: one boy, Scramm, is married with a baby on the way. For some, it's the prize itself; the pot of gold at the end. Some of the boys have hidden, darker reasons for doing the Walk. But they all drop, and they all die. And at the end, days of ceaseless walking later, feet hobbled and flayed and bloody, his friends shot dead before his very eyes, one of them survives. Although, as McVries, a boy whom Garraty befriends, is quick to point out, it's a raw form of survival: a survival in which the prize is to realise that nothing can make up for what you've seen and what you've done.

The Long Walk, it's plain to see, is a metaphor for war; specifically, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam which was taking place during the novel's gestation: the televised draft, the horror of seeing new friends die, the seeming lack of reason for it occurring in the first place. To all involved, it's endless; or, rather, there is only one end. And the winner – I won't spoil who it is here – is damaged beyond belief. King manages to encapsulate some of what it must be like to survive when all around you is blood and gunshots in the darkness and your friends falling to their deaths.

It's very tempting in these rereads for me to focus on who I was when I read the book for the first time, but sometimes needs must: as a teenage boy, I saw so much of myself in the protagonists of The Long Walk that it scared me to read it. With the first Iraq war feeling as if it was on the cusp of turning into something that could, in some crazy future, directly involve me, it was scarier still. The jingoistic nature of army recruitment, the screams of doing your duty and honouring your country, all of that, it's all in The Long Walk: in the pride that the Major inspires at the start and end, in the national anthems and parades and flags draped over jeeps; in the way that the Walkers, hating the Major as the Walk goes on, stop to applaud when he passes in some jarring show of respect; in the dead eyes and unfaltering bullets of the soldiers told to kill those Walkers who have done nothing wrong except stop walking; and in the Walkers themselves, who don't know why they signed up, and don't understand why they're doing this, but know that they cannot stop until they're told that it's over.

Next time

We're waking from a five-year coma with special powers as we step into The Dead Zone.