by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
Stephen King opens Blaze with a warning that it is a trunk novel, a story that’s been set aside in a metaphorical trunk because the author doesn’t like it or no one wants it. With King’s publishing history, I think we know which reason this novel must have been trunked.
This book may hold a trunk record though. It languished for 35 years by the time it was published in 2007 after the first draft was completed 1972 and ’73.
King says he read the manuscript over on two different occasions years apart and hated it both times.
He mentions that Hard Case Crime and The Colorado Kid had “slow royalty payments.” I’m not sure if he meant due to the buyers or due to the publisher.
At some point, he lost a novel called The Cannibals. It was over 200 pages long! Under the Dome was 50 pages along when he lost that and had to start over.
He had to borrow back his own copy of Blaze from a library that held it as part of a collection. They xeroxed it for him because they didn’t trust him not to lose it.
Proceeds for this novel at one point went to the Haven Foundation that supported writers in need, I believe.
King says he kept the time period of the novel vague and the emotion in the piece dry on purpose.
The novel opens with a haunted man boosting himself a ride. Shawshank prison is mentioned as the place he’ll end up if any of this goes wrong. Well, it almost has to go wrong, doesn’t it? The mentality impaired criminal forgets his mask during one robbery and then goes on to make other, smaller mistakes that lead to bigger trouble. He got by over the years with being a dumb guy with slightly smarter partners. There are lots of good bits about the kidnapper slipping up that are peppered with precision throughout the story.
“My laws,” says a character like Old Tom from The Stand. The baby shop clerk’s personality and speech patterns changed a good bit between our meetings with her.
Bool! King’s new favorite word, for God’s sake. He used bool extensively in the previous novel Lisey’s Story, and I hope this word doesn’t hang around long in the coming books. Please, move on to another fixation, sir.
An FBI agent prays over a toilet like the warden from the Breaker’s compound in The Dark Tower.
The flashbacks in the story are written well and interestingly. King says he thought the flashbacks were the best part of the original draft. At the risk of encouraging King’s flashback addiction, the past and present are almost of equal interest in this version of the story, in my opinion. Both carried me through the text swiftly.
For some reason, the flashback to the blueberry farm later in the novel drew me in the most and right at the beginning when I didn’t know anything about what was going to happen in that vignette.
King tends to give characters a way out before the really bad stuff happens. They have a path, that if they took it while it was open, before everything got out of control, they would have been spared the suffering to come. They never take it.
In the context of Blaze, our main character’s way out was his hard work that led to an offer that fell through with an untimely loss in his youth. In this case, the way out was largely outside his control.
In the midst of a rolling tragedy, King offers some isolated side redemptions that mean a lot. An unknown illegitimate son goes on to make something of himself with no knowledge of the events in the story. A baby looks up for a particular face. For a small moment, a character is remembered.
There is one hint at a psychic connection between the main character and a partner who later haunts his imagination. Other than that, it appears our character has limited access to a well of intelligence within himself no one thought possible.
We have a dramatic ending followed by an excerpt from a news conference.
My next post in this series will be Before Duma Key which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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