Last year, Ray Bradbury published a novel that he had begun as a young man in his 20s but only recently completed, basically collaborating with himself.
After his assistant discovered a novel he had written and set aside long ago, Stephen King did something similar.
Before fame and fortune grabbed him by the lapels and took him on the ride of his life, King wrote and published novels under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. Some of King’s earliest efforts – before he wrote “Carrie” – became the core of Bachman’s oeuvre.
But, according to a recent foreword by King, one particularly early effort, “Blaze,” didn’t initially measure up to Bachman’s leftover standards: “After reading the first 20 pages or so, I decided my first judgment had been correct, and returned it to purdah.”
Years afterward, older and wiser, King took yet another look at this “trunk novel” and recognized something worth saving, even though it contains prose that, as King says, makes use of the three Ps: “purple, pulsing and panting.”
So 50-something King sat down to collaborate with his 20-something self, dusting off and sprucing up a nearly four-decade-old novel that pays homage to John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” as well the work of writers like James T. Farrell, Charles Dickens and even James M. Cain.
The victim of an abusive father who left him mentally disabled, Clayton “Blaze” Blaisdell Jr. grew up in Maine orphanages and the occasional foster home (in most of which Blaze suffered more abuse). No surprise, then, that Blaze falls into the petty criminal lifestyle. And after meeting up with George Rackley, Blaze gets involved in the planning and perpetrating of serious crimes, “two man short cons,” as King writes.
But their latest involves the kidnapping of a baby from a family in the wealthy “old money” neighborhoods of Ocoma Heights. The only glitch in the plan is that smart-aleck, ill-tempered George recently mouthed off to the wrong man in the wrong pool hall, resulting in his death. Blaze goes ahead with the master plan, continuing to hear George’s admonitions and advice in his mind, as if George’s angry spirit is still with him. Surprising himself, Blaze succeeds in the kidnapping, and with state troopers, the FBI and local cops, especially one Albert Sterling, hot on his trail, Blaze knows he has to get his ransom soon or risk being caught. The only problem is that he’s becoming attached to baby Joe Gerard.
“Blaze” is a solid piece of crime fiction, but certainly not something worth raising the roof over in terms of praise – King himself notes that in his introduction – and certainly doesn’t rank with his best work (“The Dead Zone,” “Misery,” “The Green Mile,” “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” “Lisey’s Story,” etc.).
There are some genuinely moving set pieces from the protagonist’s days as a child, and King does a good job of getting into Blaze’s mindset, slowly turning the petty criminal into a likable antihero, and eventually getting under the reader’s skin.
Told in a combination of flashbacks that reveal his sad adolescence and a present-day narrative that focuses on the kidnapping, the story of Clayton Blaisdell Jr. probably would have worked better at novella length. At that length, King has turned out some breathtaking pieces of fiction – “The Body,” “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” “Hearts in Atlantis” – but turning “Blaze” into a novella would require a massive rewrite.
As it is, “Blaze” is still an entertaining if sometimes purple piece of fiction that will be of interest mostly to hardcore King fans and aficionados of crime fiction.
As a sort of bonus, perhaps, the publisher has included the beginnings of King’s next novel, “Duma Key,” which, from the enticing little excerpt, promises to be every bit as interesting as the last six or seven novels King has written following his life-changing brush with death in 1999.
Dorman T. Shindler is a freelancer from Missouri.
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FICTION
Blaze
By Richard Bachman (Stephen King)
$25
