Blaze by Richard Bachman/Stephen King

                           

I've described my binge-and-purge method of reading before, but I'll summarize it again. I will gobble up everything by an author in a period of one or two weeks, then get sick of it and not pick it up again for years.

Right now, I'm on a Stephen King kick. I've bought 20 or more King books, in various editions, over the last two and a half weeks.  (God bless thrift stores and their 69 cent novels!)

Blaze is a trunk novel, one King wrote in the '70's under the penname of Richard Bachman and then put aside for decades.  Allegedly it's the last of the Bachman books (honest and true this time) which would be grand, because the 'death by cancer of the pseudonym' stuff got old 15 years ago.

It's a pretty good yarn with an tried and tested plot.  A rich couple's baby is abducted in the night by Blaze, a mentally impaired giant of a man. He wants to ransom it off but winds up falling in love with the boy instead. The police are close to capturing him, and small wonder: at one point Blaze uses his own name when negotiating the ransom.

It's a 'straight' book, with no horror or supernatural influences. Even the voice of Blaze's deceased partner is well and truly in Blaze's damaged mind. For the briefest of moments late in the book King hints at something more, something otherworldly, but that passes and the reader moves on. To my mind it was an awkward moment that jarred the tone of the book, but that's either my imagination or one of the reasons King buried the book for so long.

I liked it. Not a prize winner, and not something I think will be in print in twenty years, but a good read. 2.5/3.0 stars out of 4.