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Blaze
First published 2007 · 449 pages
A gritty, wintry tragedy about a doomed, slow-witted criminal whose desperate kidnapping plot turns into a heartbreaking story of accidental love.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like watching a slow-motion car crash on an icy road—you know tragedy is inevitable, yet you cannot look away. Written in the lean, cynical voice of King's Bachman persona, the narrative is steeped in a bleak, wintry atmosphere that chills you to the bone. It balances the gritty tension of a botched kidnapping with a surprising, rough-hewn tenderness as the hulking, mentally impaired protagonist forms an unexpected bond with his infant hostage. The prose is unsparing and hardboiled, driving a brisk pace that flashes back through a lifetime of abuse and societal neglect. It is a deeply melancholic, suspenseful experience that will resonate with readers who love empathetic antiheroes and doomed, noir-tinged tragedies.
- Mood
- wintry
- bleak
- tense
- tragic
- Tone
- melancholic
- gritty
- empathetic
- cynical
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- doomed innocence · cycle of abuse · societal neglect · unconventional fatherhood · the burden of memory
- The writing
- Lean, hardboiled, and unsparing, characteristic of the Bachman voice but laced with a surprising, rough-hewn empathy.
- The arc
- Moves from desperate, gritty criminality into a poignant, doomed tenderness before culminating in inevitable tragedy.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate gritty, character-driven crime tragedies and sympathetic antiheroes doomed by their circumstances.
Content notes
- child endangerment
- child abuse
- violence
- ableist language
- animal death
About the book
Blaze is a novel by American writer Stephen King, published under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. King announced on his website that he "found it" in an attic. As stated in the afterword of Different Seasons, it was written before Carrie. King offered the original draft of the novel to his Doubleday publishers at the same time as 'Salem's Lot; the latter was chosen to be his second novel and Blaze became a "trunk novel." King rewrote the manuscript, editing out much of what he perceived as over-sentimentality in the original text, and offered the book for publication in 2007.
Description from Open Library.
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