Blaze

     Typically, reviews of Stephen King books start out with a reviewer going on a lengthy explanation of whether they feel it’s appropriate for a book to be “mere entertainment” and still be considered literature.  I’m going to skip the lengthy explanation and just say that, while I’m an enormous fan of Joyce, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with just telling a good story, and letting that be that.

     Even though this is the King book you’ll find on the new release table, it’s actually one of his oldest works now in circulation.  He wrote it in 1973, before he wrote Carrie, his first published novel, and even though he says he’s rewritten it extensively (to adjust the period references, mostly), it still reads like old King: it’s straightahead, suspenseful fiction.  It lacks some of the stylistic frills that King’s recent work has acquired, the oft-repeated phrases coinages, the so-folksy-it’s-almost-a-liability narrative voice, but it still reads like a polished novel written by an experienced writer.  This is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, the book lacks some of the urgency and intensity of King’s other early stories, like Carrie and The Shining; on the other, it’s a true intellectual feast to see what’s clearly an “old King” book rewritten by the same man, over thirty years later.

     And Blaze is still very clearly “old King” because of one fact: I can sum up its plot in one sentence.  Many recent books by the author have become, perhaps against his wishes, much more literary and sprawling in scope.  I loved Lisey’s Story, but I couldn’t for the life of me explain what its about in thirty seconds.  Blaze, on the other hand, is a story about a humongous, mentally impaired criminal kidnapping a famous baby for ransom; the “Kingian” twist is that he’s accompanied by his recently deceased partner in crime, the brains of the operation, as he does all this.  The plot is double barreled, half of it taking place in flashback form as we find out how Clayton “Blaze” Blaisdell came to be the man he is, while simultaneously following his current caper.  The frame story is not honestly as enjoyable to read as the flashbacks, though it does do its job of providing enough suspense to keep you flipping pages.  The bulk of the “modern” part of the story’s coolness comes from the terse conversations between Blaze and the dead man, and from the truly howling storm that King sets the story in.

     Like the book King modeled it after, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Blaze is a fast read.  It’s also an incredibly enjoyable story and, for we few members of the intelligentsia who don’t scoff at popular fiction, a surprisingly cerebral look into a modern writer’s humble beginnings.  The proceeds of the book, if it matters to you, will be donated to King’s Haven Foundation, which supports freelance artists who have been seriously injured or otherwise set back.  If it doesn’t matter, King writes in his prologue that the point of the book was to give you “a good story.”  That you will definitely get.  If you want more, there’s a bonus short story in the back of the novel, the “germ” from which King’s next novel, Duma Key, will grow.