Blaze: A Novel

Blazeby Richard BachmanForeword by Stephen King Full Disclosure Dear Constant Reader, This is a trunk novel, okay? I want you to know that while you've still got your sales slip and before you drip something like gravy or ice cream on it, and thus make it difficult or impossible to return. It's a revised and updated trunk novel, but that doesn't change the basic fact. The Bachman name is on it because it's the last novel from 1966-1973, which was that gentleman's period of greatest productivity. During those years I was actually two men. It was Stephen King who wrote (and sold) horror stories to raunchy skin-mags likeCavalierandAdam,but it was Bachman who wrote a series of novels that didn't sell to anybody. These includedRage, The Long Walk, Roadwork,andThe Running Man.All four were published as paperback originals. Blazewas the last of those early novels'the fifth quarter, if you like. Or just another well-known writer's trunk novel, if you insist. It was written in late 1972 and early 1973. I thought it was great while I was writing it, and crap when I read it over. My recollection is that I never showed it to a single publisher -- not even Doubleday, where I had made a friend named William G. Thompson. Bill was the guy who would later discover John Grisham, and it was Bill who contracted for the book followingBlaze,a twisted but fairly entertaining tale of prom-night in central Maine. I forgot aboutBlazefor a few years. Then, after the other early Bachmans had been published, I took it out and looked it over. After reading the first twenty pages or so, I decided my first judgment had been correct, and returned it to purdah. I thought the writing was okay, but the story reminded me of something Oscar Wilde once said. He claimed it was impossible to read "The Old Curiosity Shop" without weeping copious tears of laughter. SoBlazewas forgotten, but never really lost. It was only stuffed in some corner of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine with the rest of their Stephen King/Richard Bachman stuff. Blazeended up spending the next thirty years in the dark. And then I published a slim paperback original calledThe Colorado Kidwith an imprint called Hard Case Crime. This line of books, the brainchild of a very smart and very cool fellow named Charles Ardai, was dedicated to reviving old "noir" and hardboiled paperback crime novels, and publishing new ones.The Kidwas decidedly softboiled, but Charles decided to publish it anyway, with one of those great old paperback covers. The whole project was a blast'except for the slow royalty payments. About a year later, I thought maybe I'd like to go the Hard Case route again, possibly with something that had a harder edge. My thoughts turned to Blaze for the first time in years, but trailing along behind came that damned Oscar Wilde quote about "The Old Curiosity Shop." TheBlazeI remembered wasn't hardboiled noir, but a three-handkerchief weepie. Still, I decided it wouldn't hurt to look. If, that was, the book could even be found. I remembered the carton, and I remembered the squarish type-face (my wife Tabitha's old college typewriter, an impossible-to-kill Olivetti portable), but I had no idea what had become of the manuscript that was supposedly inside the carton. For all I knew, it was gone, baby, gone. It wasn't. Marsha, one of my two valuable assistants, found it in the Fogler Library. She would not trust me with the original manuscript (I, uh, lose things), but she made a Xerox. I must have been using a next-door-to-dead typewriter ribbon when I composedBlaze,because the copy was barely legible, and the notes in the margins were little more than blurs. Still, I sat down with it and began to read, ready to suffer the pangs of embarrassment only one's younger, smart-assier self can providRichard Bachman is the author of 'Blaze: A Novel', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416554844 and ISBN 141655484X.