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It's an old story: King passes test

Erica Noonan - August 25, 2007

Stephen King is constantly testing us.

Will we read his experimental Web-only novel? How about his confusing gothic Western "Gunslinger" series? The book about cellphones turning people into zombies? Those unpolished novels he writes under a pseudonym, including the one about the fat guy who nearly starves to death after being cursed by angry gypsies?

We will?

Well then, how about the novel he wrote under a pseudonym 30 years ago and abandoned in a dark corner of the University of Maine's Fogler Library? Do we love him enough to read that?

The answer is, amazingly, yes. But just barely.

There are few American authors who can get away with a book that borrows liberally from John Steinbeck's novel "Of Mice and Men" and the Lindbergh kidnapping, which whipped the nation into a frenzy in 1932.

King, a.k.a. Richard Bachman, manages to accomplish this in this novel, "Blaze." Or rather his alter-ego Bachman's last novel, completed in 1973, a year before the real-life King launched his career with the hit "Carrie."

The story centers on Clayton "Blaze" Blaisdell Jr., who loses his mother as a child and grows into a brain-damaged 6-foot-7-inch, 300-pound giant after being hurled down the stairs by his abusive, drunken father.

He drifts through a foster home and sharecropping jobs until meeting up with a fellow convict, George Rackley, who hatches a plot to kidnap Joey Gerard IV, the infant son of a wealthy family.

George dies before the plan can unfold, but his ghost sticks around to talk to Blaze, who musters the courage to pull off the caper by himself and escape into the backwoods of Maine in a fast-moving story filled with flashbacks and meandering narrative passages.

Blaze is a surprisingly sympathetic character, gentle with baby Joey and almost lovable at times. But his life is too damaged for salvation, and in the end he is both victim and criminal.

King offers an amusing forward about the history of the manuscript, an updated "trunk" novel, the last of a series of five books, including "Rage" and "The Running Man," which King dryly tells us, "didn't sell to anyone." (In fact, King pulled "Rage" out of publication after a copy was found in the locker of a Paducah, Ky., boy who shot three schoolmates in 1997 because the author considered its fictional plot -- a disturbed teen shoots two teachers and holds his algebra class at gunpoint -- too violent.) Only a prolific writer like King could yank one of his books off the shelves, and declare it good riddance.

He's also so successful that he needs no profits from "Blaze." Proceeds go the The Haven Foundation, his charity to help uninsured artists whose accidents or illnesses have left them unable to work.

"Blaze" is both a stylistic throwback and King's personal editing journey back to his younger, cockier self. It is by no means his best writing, or most impressive storytelling.

It fits into the hard-boiled, unsentimental approach to crime and violence that has reemerged as a minor league cultural trend.

"Blaze" isn't a major literary event, but its unexpected likability shows that King can do just about anything he wants, and his fans will stay along for the ride.

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It's an old story: King passes test

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