I just finished reading (I guess ‘listening’ would be a more appropriate term, since they were audiobooks) ‘Blaze: A Novel
King’s novel was released as one of the “Bachman” books that had been sitting in a shorter format, forgotten for decades before King rediscovered, rewrote, and published it. The novel is told almost exclusively from the perspective of Blaze, a hulking man with a dented forehead that has left with a somewhat diminished mental capacity. Blaze and his partner, George, are in the process of planning the ‘one, last, big score’. In this case the crime they are planning is the kidnapping and ransom of the infant grandchild of local millionaires. George is smarter, older, and more pessimistic than Blaze, but as the story unfolds, we also discover that he’s dead. The question as to whether George exists solely in Blaze’s head or in a supernatural form that guides Blaze’s crimes is constantly raised throughout the book.
The interesting perspective that this book takes is that there is essentially only one character. George is around and constantly talks with Blaze, but he’s not physically there. If this story is ever filmed, Blaze would be the only character that you see for most of the running time. Regardless, the story never suffers from this limitation. It occasionally moves through flashbacks, and these detours let us see more and more of Blaze’s tragic life. The end seems inevitable but is never strained like some of King’s other works. King sometimes seems to get a great idea for a story, but writes himself into a corner. His endings sometimes bare the scars of these literary cul-de-sacs as he struggles to wrap things up at the end. Books like ‘It’, ‘Salem’s Lot’, ‘The Shining’, and ‘Blaze