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Last Updated: Oct 16th, 2008 - 13:33:17 |
Blaze is a criminal. And he wants to commit the crime of the century. He and George came up with the idea: Kidnap the baby and get the money. But now George is dead and Blaze has to do it alone. But that's OK because George is going to be with Blaze every step of the way.
In the forward, Stephen King tells readers the new Richard Bachman book Blaze is an old story. He confesses the "new" book is actually a "trunk book," something he wrote 25 years ago. And if you have any aversion to this, return it before you spill something on it.
But why would we do that? That's like telling a driver not to rubberneck as he passes a horrible accident.
And Blaze is a fine car wreck in the tradition of the hardboiled crime novels of the '30s and '40s, a return to the fiction-noir style of the original four Bachman books.
The story of Blaze pays homage to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. As a character, Blaze is Bachman's Lenny, something King points out in the forward. But Blaze's mental short-comings are due to his abusive and violent upbringing and not because he was born slow. His stepfather handed him the first card in the horrible deck Blaze would be dealt by tossing the young boy repeatedly down the steep wooden stairs of the family's apartment. After that the young Blaze was shuffled into the state system. Constantly beaten by the headmaster of the orphanage and taken to a foster home where he was almost killed by a pack of collies, Blaze was stomped down until he met George. George showed Blaze how to con and Blaze was good at it. When George came back from vacation in the clink he had a plan for the "big one." The one they could retire on.
Readers should also know a Bachman book is not a Stephen King novel, an expectation guaranteed to disappoint. The "two authors" write with different styles.
This abstract idea of writing with a split personality is best explained by King in the novel, The Dark Half, a fictional account of the horrors he has felt at times by feeling split between two personalities and two writing styles.
According to King, Bachman died 22 years ago. This is the second book released posthumously by Bachman. In 1996, The Regulators was published in tandem with Stephen King's Desperation.
In 1984, Richard Bachman had some success with the release of his second novel, Thinner. His first novel, a collection of stories entitled The Bachman Books, had barely made a blip on the literary radar. However, the commercial success of Thinner was soon overshadowed with scandal as Bachman was linked to horror writer Stephen King. The ensuing stress and misery of being outted as King's dark half, Bachman developed a rare case of pseudonym cancer. He died the following year.
King has given credit to Bachman's widow, Claudia, for bringing these novels to life. She reportedly found them in the attic of her New Hampshire home during the move after Richard's death. Though, she admits, she has no idea when Richard wrote them. She points out he did suffer from insomnia, an ailment King has admittedly suffered from as well.
King makes no bones about Blaze and Bachman's success even now - 22 years after the man's death - though concedes this is the last Bachman book. But if King's pseudonym nightmare of The Dark Half has taught us anything, it's hard to keep a dead man down.
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