Blaze

Since I've been on a reading kick lately (getting ready for the big Harry P. release) I picked this one up at the Barnes & Noble, Stephen King's new thriller, rather Richard Bachman's (who we all know as Steve's nom de plume from back in the day), Blaze. I grabbed it because I read The Bachman Books back in high school and loved them all, despite what other people might say about them. I never read any of the other Bachman novels (Thinner or last decade's Regulators), although I have them on my shelf. When I saw this one in the store, I immediately grabbed it and read the introduction.

The set-up that Steve gives us is this: it's a novel he wrote 30 years ago that he thought was bad and never published until recently when he went looking for it and realized it wasn't so bad at all and with minimal re-work he could get up to passable snuff and dump it into the marketing machine. Oh, and all the proceeds go to some sort of starving artist's charity. So it's a philanthropy piece.

Well, it's not "bad," no, I wouldn't say that. However, fans of Steve's work (we, his Constant Readers) will recognize many of his recurring themes and devices, in particular: flashbacks to childhood where important (and often more interesting than the rest of the novel) scenes play out which explain why the adult characters are the way they are (see It, Dreamcatcher, etc). They will also recognize that it's not some of his better work. Even if he hadn't spilled the beans in the introduction, I think most of us would have wondered which drawer he'd pulled this from.

It's a fast read and one that Constant Readers like me will tear through and be done with in no time. And afterward, we'll reflect on the fact that he's gotten better in the past 30 years and look forward to the next "real" Stephen King novel.