By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
There's a reason Stephen King's name — he wrote the foreword to Blaze— is bigger on the book jacket than that of author Richard Bachman: King is, or was, Bachman.
Rabid King fans already know this. Between 1966 and 1973, King, writing as Bachman, produced four novels: Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork and The Running Man. Blaze, written toward the end of that period, was relegated to the castoff pile — until now. King has snatched it from obscurity, revised it and polished it. The result is an exquisitely written tale of suspense laced with one man's yearning for acceptance and love.
EXCERPT: Get a sneak peek at 'Blaze'
Clayton "Blaze" Blaisdell Jr. is a guy who never got a break. His mother was struck and killed by a truck when he was 3. Several years later, his drunken father threw him down a flight of stairs, dragged him back up, threw him down again, then repeated the process.
Blaisdell, forever more, would be categorized as "a big dummy" — and at his full adult height of 6 feet, 7 inches, he's a very big dummy indeed. The stairs incident left him with a huge dent in his forehead, "deep enough for a frog pond." It's a symbol of the pain and loneliness that will haunt his entire life.
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As a young man, he turns to the art of the con. George Rackley, his partner in crime, wants to pull a crime of the century: kidnap a baby, the heir to an enormous fortune. Rackley dies before they can pull it off, but Blaze, hearing Rackley's voice in his head, kidnaps the baby on his own.
And that's when it happens: Blaze, who has lived with a perpetually bruised heart, falls head over heels in love with baby Joe. He feeds him, he changes him, he soothes him when he cries. "You're all right. You're okay. You're rockin'. Go to sleep. Hushabye-hushaboo, zippity-doo."
Here is the unconditional love to heal Blaze's malnourished heart. He imagines Joe growing up under his care. Blaze would "have somebody." But should Blaze keep Joe or should he give him back to his parents? Or should he do what the voice in his head is telling him — "kill that kid!"?
Blaze, you might think, is a very bad man, but readers will root for him from the moment he goes flying down those stairs and lands on his head. King builds on that empathy by threading flashbacks to Blaze's life of missed opportunities and blown chances throughout the dead-of-winter, dogged manhunt for man and baby.
In this unexpectedly heartfelt novel, the words swirl up off the pages, forming cinematic images that engage the mind and tug at the heart. It's classic American noir. Here's hoping there's another Bachman novel moldering in a trunk somewhere.
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