Title: Blaze
Author: Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King)
Publisher: Scribner
Year Published: 2007

The first five words of the book’s foreword sum it up best: “This is a trunk novel, ok?”

I am a huge fan of Stephen King and, by extension, Richard Bachman. I have close to everything he has published, with I think the only exception being Roadwork (and no, I don’t have a particular reason, I just never got around to getting it). Some of his work ranks up among my favorites of all time (The Stand, The Dark Tower series, The Shining, On Writing, too many of his short stories to list). Mostly, though, they fall into the kind of book I love to spend a long rainy weekend with and then forget about. Novels like The Regulators and Bag of Bones and Hearts in Atlantis that I thoroughly enjoy and then set aside without much of a second thought.

Occasionally, however, something reaches my self that, had I any less dedication to Mr. King, would never have garnered my attention. Blaze is just such a novel.

As most any writer can tell you, a trunk novel is a story which was written and then, for whatever reason, tossed into a trunk. Maybe it made the rounds among agents and/or editors and gathered nothing but rejection slips along the way. Or maybe the author just knew it wasn’t up to snuff and threw it in the trunk when he or she got tired of trying to get it up to snuff. Whatever the case, it was labeled as unworthy of publication by someone and then placed into a trunk for storage… most often, for permanent storage.

For reasons he explains in the foreword, King dusted off Blaze, gave it a few touch-ups here and there, and set it adrift in the seas of big-market merchandising. Personally, I think he should have left it in the trunk. I also think, had this been written by anyone other than a top-tier author with a built-in audience with zombie-like devotion (like yours truly) this novel would never have been accepted for publication.

That said, I will admit that I found the character of Blaze oddly compelling. I didn’t like the story itself, nor how it was told, but I was really interested in the character Bachman created. I thought that he deserved more written about him, as his downfall was never really justified by the flashback-type setups Bachman employed.

I am still glad I bought the book, though, if only for two reasons. First, the five page Foreword (titled “Full Disclosure”) is great. It doesn’t justify the reasons for the publication of Blaze, but it does give some insight behind the decision, and it’s just so refreshingly honest. Second, the book closes with the short story “Memory,” originally published in Tin House in 2006. This short is simply wonderful, and worth the price of the novel alone. It is, according to a footnote on the title page, the seed that Duma Key grew from (coming in 2008), for which I am now very excited.