Book Review: Blaze by Richard Bachman

An early "trunk novel" that's been pruned of its young author's overly sentimental leanings, Richard Bachman's Blaze was published 35 years after its original inception in the early seventies. Now that it's showing up on the remainder tables alongside Patricia Cornwall's ongoing attempts to erase every last slice of reader loyalty we once held for Kay Scarpetta, it's a good time to check out this very readable footnote in the Stephen King collection.

Blaze centers on a protagonist clearly modeled after Lenny from Of Mice And Men. His pal and protector is even named George, though unfortunately for Clayton Blaisdell, Jr. (a.k.a. Blaze), by the time this crime-gone-bad novel opens George is already dead, knifed for being too lucky at a craps game. This leaves poor Blaze, a hulking man/child suffering brain damage from the multiple times his drunken father threw him down the stairs, to try and carry on George's big score on his lonesome. The crime concocted: the abduction of six-month-old Joe Gerard, son of a wealthy Maine family. With the hectoring ghost voice of his dead crony alternately advising and browbeating him, Blaze is able to carry out the kidnapping, even though he hasn't quite worked out how he's gonna get any ransom from it.

We know Blaze is doomed from the beginning - he can't even consistently remember that George is dead - though we can't help worrying as to whether little Joe will make it out alive. At one point in the book, for instance, Blaze leaves the infant in George's "care" while he drives into town to mail a ransom note. Stephen King's alter ego can be a pretty merciless writer, we think. How far will he take this story?

Per King, the original manuscript of Blaze, the product of a still-very-young novelist, was drippy in the manner of Dickens at his most maudlin (the writer even quotes Oscar Wilde's notorious putdown of The Old Curiosity Shop in the book's foreword). The older, wiser author states that he wanted "to strip all the sentiment I could from the writing itself" in the book's final draft, though a few small schmaltzy moments inevitably linger.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is a Books editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy comic fat acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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