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Stephen King, Blaze (Scribner, 2007)
My initial thoughts on this book were running somewhere along the lines of “if you like Stephen King novels in general, you'll like Blaze”. It seemed a pretty safe thing to say, really. And then I started reading reviews, both from the pros and the user community, and I found out just how wrong I was. Man, this book has been savaged up one side and down the other. And while some of those bad reviews you can easily dismiss out of hand (someone actually called the book “overly wordy”, despite, at 285 pages, it being King's shortest novel in some thirty years or more), enough decent criticisms emerged that taking the safe path in my own review seemed like the wrong way to go; I'm actually going to have to defend this sucker, and that's not something I ever thought I'd have to do when reviewing a King novel.
If you've read anything at all about the book, you know two things: first, that it's a “trunk novel”, as King calls old pieces he pulls out and polishes up, and it's one of the very few that had not previously been published; and secondly, that it's a backhanded homage to Of Mice and Men. (You will also find out, whilst reading the introduction, that King really, really hates most of the Bachman novels. I find this depressing; Rage remains one of my favorite pieces of early King.) You can tack those two things together into a kind of patchwork and have a basic idea of where this book is going, but there's a third piece you need to add—King worked on it during the days when he was writing hard-boiled crime fiction (viz. “The Fifth Quarter”, another of my early-King favorites), and this book has a streak of Hammett about a mile wide running through it. Okay, now that the scene's set, a very oversimplified version of the plot: Clayton “Blaze” Blaisdell (Jr.) was a very smart kid, until systematic abuse from his drunk father turned him into a brain-damage case. There's still smart kid locked up in there, it's just that Blaze can't get to it often. After Blaze got out of the orphanage where the state stuck him after the head-injury incident, he hooked up with George, a small-time con artist, and the two of them made their money on the dark side of things. Like most petty criminals, they always talked about the big score, the one on which they could retire. Then George goes and gets himself killed, leaving Blaze on his own. And between the smart-kid stuff inside his head and the voice of George, which keeps popping up between his ears, Blaze gets the idea that he might be able to pull off the big score himself: the kidnapping and holding for ransom of the infant son of the town's richest family. Once we have the setup, the story is told in parallel: we get the present-day kidnapping storyline, and a past storyline that details Blaze's coming up through the orphanage, meeting George, and embarking on a life of crime.
I guess it does make sense that if you're looking for the usual supernatural-horror Stephen King novel, and you find yourself confronted with what is in essence a piece of noir fiction, you're probably going to be disappointed. Kind of a bummer, because King is often at his best when he's writing noir (viz. The Colorado Kid), even when he puts his own spin on it (viz. “Umney's Last Case”). While no one would ever confuse Blaze for one of the books that often get King tabbed for Shakespearean immortality among his more fanatical defenders (in my case, those books have always been 'Salem's Lot, The Stand, and Misery, along with a handful of stories from Night Shift), this is good, solid work. It was probably for the best that King did some rewriting and revising along the way, but since I'm never going to see the original manuscript, I'll just take it on faith when King tells us that in the preface. And the whole homage thing? Why are you letting that bother you, folks? Remember that The Dark Tower was an homage to Browning.
Which brings me back to my original premise, if a tad revised. If you like Stephen King novels, you're going to like Blaze. Of course you will, because it's Stephen King, and you like Stephen King. I will, however, plead with you to go into it with an open mind. This is not necessarily a turn-your-brain-off-and-enjoy ride; most of King's early works aren't (consider, again, “The Fifth Quarter”). But I can assure you one thing: you will get out of it what you put in. *** ½
My initial thoughts on this book were running somewhere along the lines of “if you like Stephen King novels in general, you'll like Blaze”. It seemed a pretty safe thing to say, really. And then I started reading reviews, both from the pros and the user community, and I found out just how wrong I was. Man, this book has been savaged up one side and down the other. And while some of those bad reviews you can easily dismiss out of hand (someone actually called the book “overly wordy”, despite, at 285 pages, it being King's shortest novel in some thirty years or more), enough decent criticisms emerged that taking the safe path in my own review seemed like the wrong way to go; I'm actually going to have to defend this sucker, and that's not something I ever thought I'd have to do when reviewing a King novel.
If you've read anything at all about the book, you know two things: first, that it's a “trunk novel”, as King calls old pieces he pulls out and polishes up, and it's one of the very few that had not previously been published; and secondly, that it's a backhanded homage to Of Mice and Men. (You will also find out, whilst reading the introduction, that King really, really hates most of the Bachman novels. I find this depressing; Rage remains one of my favorite pieces of early King.) You can tack those two things together into a kind of patchwork and have a basic idea of where this book is going, but there's a third piece you need to add—King worked on it during the days when he was writing hard-boiled crime fiction (viz. “The Fifth Quarter”, another of my early-King favorites), and this book has a streak of Hammett about a mile wide running through it. Okay, now that the scene's set, a very oversimplified version of the plot: Clayton “Blaze” Blaisdell (Jr.) was a very smart kid, until systematic abuse from his drunk father turned him into a brain-damage case. There's still smart kid locked up in there, it's just that Blaze can't get to it often. After Blaze got out of the orphanage where the state stuck him after the head-injury incident, he hooked up with George, a small-time con artist, and the two of them made their money on the dark side of things. Like most petty criminals, they always talked about the big score, the one on which they could retire. Then George goes and gets himself killed, leaving Blaze on his own. And between the smart-kid stuff inside his head and the voice of George, which keeps popping up between his ears, Blaze gets the idea that he might be able to pull off the big score himself: the kidnapping and holding for ransom of the infant son of the town's richest family. Once we have the setup, the story is told in parallel: we get the present-day kidnapping storyline, and a past storyline that details Blaze's coming up through the orphanage, meeting George, and embarking on a life of crime.
I guess it does make sense that if you're looking for the usual supernatural-horror Stephen King novel, and you find yourself confronted with what is in essence a piece of noir fiction, you're probably going to be disappointed. Kind of a bummer, because King is often at his best when he's writing noir (viz. The Colorado Kid), even when he puts his own spin on it (viz. “Umney's Last Case”). While no one would ever confuse Blaze for one of the books that often get King tabbed for Shakespearean immortality among his more fanatical defenders (in my case, those books have always been 'Salem's Lot, The Stand, and Misery, along with a handful of stories from Night Shift), this is good, solid work. It was probably for the best that King did some rewriting and revising along the way, but since I'm never going to see the original manuscript, I'll just take it on faith when King tells us that in the preface. And the whole homage thing? Why are you letting that bother you, folks? Remember that The Dark Tower was an homage to Browning.
Which brings me back to my original premise, if a tad revised. If you like Stephen King novels, you're going to like Blaze. Of course you will, because it's Stephen King, and you like Stephen King. I will, however, plead with you to go into it with an open mind. This is not necessarily a turn-your-brain-off-and-enjoy ride; most of King's early works aren't (consider, again, “The Fifth Quarter”). But I can assure you one thing: you will get out of it what you put in. *** ½