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How long does it take to read The Running Man?

Stephen King

The Running Man by Stephen King takes about 4 hours 42 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 42 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1982. 256 pages, about 70,400 words.

10 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 7 hours 49 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 42 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 56 minutes

The page count is the median across 40 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

The Running Man is a dystopian thriller novel by American writer Stephen King, first published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982 as a paperback original. It was collected in 1985 in the omnibus The Bachman Books. The novel is set in a dystopian United States during the year 2025, in which the nation's economy is in ruins and world violence is rising. The story follows protagonist Ben Richards as he participates in the reality show The Running Man in which contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are chased by the general public, who get a huge bounty if they kill him. The book has a total of 101 chapters, laid out in a "countdown" format. The first is titled "Minus 100 and Counting ..." with the numbers decreasing, ending with the last chapter called "Minus 000 and Counting" (or, in some versions, simply "000").

Content warnings (AI-checked, may be incomplete)
  • violence
  • death of a child

How these are chosen

Subjects: horror fiction, Game shows, Television game shows, Fiction, Suspense, science fiction

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