The Running Man was, for me, one of those books you read after you've seen the movie. I knew that it was a Stephen King novel; it was the last of the compiled Bachman Books I owned (though not the last to be written by the Bachman persona; there were still three more to be published – four if you count Misery), the only one I hadn't read yet. I watched the movie, because the TV movie of It was (to my adolescent self) incredible, and I had seen The Shining and that was incredible, and this had Arnold Schwarzenegger in it and I loved Predator… It was a series of things that led to me watching the film first, and then reading the book. And that was a curious experience for me.

First published in 1982 under the Bachman pseudonym, The Running Man is a particularly SFish dystopian novel about a future where America is run by a totalitarian government, and television game shows are bloody and omnipresent. Essentially, it's The Hunger Games. King wrote it in a week (in fact, 72 hours, apparently) and it was pretty much published as a first draft. Nowadays, the film is far more famous than the book; an action classic, of sorts. It's full of fight scenes and statements about the nature of television; of sitting down and watching while atrocities occur; of a quasi-plausible future.

Fourteen-year-old me didn't really care about that. I cared, back then, that Arnie was the main character, and he kicked all sorts of ass. He quipped while killing the bad guys ("What a pain in the neck!" when beheading somebody; "He had to split!" when cutting somebody in half; "He was Subzero, now he's just plain zero!" when killing a man whose gimmick is ice-related)! He smoked an endless run of cigars! He fought for the rights of the common people! He won the love of a woman by being really, really masculine (in a way that, now, is actually a little bit creepy). He brought down the entire government/evil TV company that framed him for murder! The film was a masterpiece of 1980s idiocy, and I totally loved it.

The book, though … Where was the quipping? Where was the fun? The plot was completely different, too. For a start, Ben Richards (and, in hindsight, I should have seen what a terrible name for an Arnie character that is) has a dying child who needs medicine, and a wife who has had to take to prostitution in order to provide for the family. He's a weak man, physically and emotionally, and desperate. He's not framed for killing protesters because he's a soldier: he's a man who is willing to do anything for his family. Over the course of the novel, the game show aspect of the movie isn't the prominent thing, unlike the neon of the filmed counterpart: instead, there's a bleakness, a sadness at the state of the world. And the ending? Well, it's quite the kicker. (Spoiler follows!) After discovering that his wife and child have been killed by the television company, Ben hijacks a plane and crashes it into their skyscraper. Quite aside from the chilling visuals that provides us with nowadays, it's a horrifying end to the novel: there's no hope there, not really. It's not as if Ben saves the day and the world and frees the people from the tyranny of the awful television state they now live in; instead he's driven (as in most of these early Bachman Books) by personal rage, deep inner pain, "his black eyes burning like the eyes of a demon". Ben is a mouthpiece for King's own views about where society could be heading; he's got something to say, and it's said through his pain.

But when I was younger, of course, this wasn't what I wanted. I didn't want moaning and suffering and politics; I wanted the quips. The film set my expectations, and the novel failed to meet them. With The Shining, it was different: I read the book first, and saw the film as an adaptation. Same with It. But I came to this the other way, and to some extent treated the King original as a novelisation. That isn't a slur; I read a lot of novelisations when I was a kid, in lieu of seeing the films (with Alien, pretty much my favourite film of all time, I'd read the Alan Dean Foster novelisation and the Simonson/Goodwin comic before I ever saw the film) .

This time, I read the book and much preferred it. Maybe I'm more attuned to the sadness now; maybe I'm better with the weaker Ben Richards, the desperation that makes him enter the competition. It's decently written: not King's best, but not his worst. The structure is interesting too, echoing his other dystopian game show novel of the period, The Long Walk. Where that novel counted down the boys left alive as part of the text, here the short chapters are on constant countdown, starting at 101. You know when the book is going to end: the timer tells you. It's a pacey device, and one that serves the game-show content of the novel, and this is a good book; mid-tier King.

After I'd read it, I thought it only fair that I also revisit the film. I hadn't seen it since I first watched it: like so many films of the time, it was eminently disposable; fun, but the sort of film you rented rather than owned. Rewatching it was odd. Turns out it's awful. Totally dreadful: lumbering and badly made; full of terrible acting, terrible quips ("What a pain in the neck!" etc), terrible everything. There's very little to love; the best thing about it is the John 'St Elmo's Fire' Parr theme song. The things that it's shouting about – television, oppression – are little more than meaningless bellows. The book has action, but it also has a point; it has pathos, where the film is all comic-action bluster. And Arnie should never have been cast as Ben Richards. He was always meant to be weak, driven, desperate; and he was always meant to have something to say.

Next: We discover that there are other worlds than these: it's The Gunslinger, the first book in King's Dark Tower series.