Bachman Goes Down in a ‘Blaze’ of Glory

“Blaze” is Richard Bachman’s last book – he wrote it in 1973. After putting it aside for a few weeks, he read through the first draft and decided that it was the most dreadful book he’d ever worked on. He put it away, moved on and didn’t care if nobody looked at it again in 30 years. Nobody did.

But then, about three years ago, one of Ste­phen King’s assistants found Bachman’s manuscript and brought it to his attention. King liked it a lot. He made a few edits and turned it over to be published. The joke is that Bachman’s book sold well enough to compete with King’s stuff.

Richard Bachman and Stephen King are, of course, the same person. King’s alter-ego published five novels before he got killed off in 1985. (He calls it “cancer of the pseudonym.”) But the myth wouldn’t die – Bach­man came back and wrote a companion piece to King’s “Desperation” called “The Regulators” in 1996. Some of his novels ac­tually take longer to read than they did to write: You’re not going to believe this, but it only took him three days to write “The Run­ning Man,” all 304 pages of it.

This book involves an ex-con named Blaze, better known to the world as Clayton Blaisdell, Jr. He’s got nothing to do now that his buddy George is dead. They used to trick people out of their money with all kinds of elaborate hoaxes: They’d “lose” wallets, cash bad checks, you name it.

But then a funny thing happens. When George dies, Blaze hears him in his head, giving him pointers on how to steal cars and thwart the police. George even helps him pull off that one big score they always talked about – kidnapping – but Blaze’s priorities change, resulting in a strange detour neither of them could’ve possibly foreseen.

This is a setup that can certainly hold down a 331-page novel (not including the forward and the bonus short story at the end), but “Blaze” is a lot more complicated than that. King understands the humanity of his characters – even the lower ones. Look at how he describes Anne Bradstay, who meets Blaze as a teenager: “…her older brother beat her when he was drunk, which was often. After that s—t, Pittsfield was a vacation. She was not a bruised girl with a heart of gold, only a bruised girl. She was not mean, but she was acquisitive, with a crow’s eye for shiny things.”

“Blaze” is a New York Times bestseller, but King doesn’t need the money – any roy­alties will go to benefit freelance artists. It doesn’t really matter, though: “Hopefully you came for a good story,” he writes, “and hopefully you will get one.”