10 Best Unfinished Stephen King Novels
3. I've Got To Get Away!
This is a cunning little story that starts with a disorientated narrator waking up with no idea who they are. They find themselves working on a conveyor belt, lost and frightened, determined to escape.
They turn to go, sliding away but are then immediately captured by the guards. It is revealed that he is a faulty robot whose sole design is to work on this belt. He is reprogrammed by the guards and put back in place.
The story finishes with the revelation that this is not the first time that this particular robot has malfunctioned many times before and it is implied that he will do so many times again in the future, leaving the reader with the idea that its existence is a pure experiment in futility.
This doomed repetition feels like something closer to a Bachman story that a King story, as the author expands on in the intro for his novel The Dark Half. Bachman books tend to have sad or nihlistic endings, whereas he tries, though not always, to keep the happier endings (or less sad, perhaps) for the King novels.
The idea of a worker, trapped forever in a situation they are doomed never to escape, is about as dark as it can get! Bachman would be proud.