Dark Half redux

BLAZE turned out to be pretty good - not great, but it definitely ranks toward the upper-middle in Bachman's ouvre. Somewhere below THE LONG WALK and THE RUNNING MAN, but just above RAGE and ROADWORK. (And I'll just have to assume it was better than THE REGULATORS.) I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't cheering by the end, either.

What I've noticed about Bachman is that he's writing a lot more like King than he used to. Witness his turn to the supernatural. RAGE and ROADWORK, were set in solid reality, a world of school shootings and government bypasses. In THE LONG WALK and THE RUNNING MAN, Bachman dabbled a bit in Sci-Fi (something King wasn't exactly averse to, either), but once it became known that King and Bachman were one and the same - coincidentally, with the publication of Bachman's first horror novel, THINNER - he seemed to get typed, as did his real-life counterpart, as a horror writer. According to the synopsis on Amazon.com, THE REGULATORS is about "an evil creature called Tak [who] uses the imagination of an autistic boy to shift a residential street in small-town Ohio into a world so bizarre and brutal that only a child could think it up." That has, if you'll pardon the pun, King written all over it. And not good King, either, but latter-day DARK TOWER spin-off King.

Although I'd only read the Bachman books after I found out he was King, they always seemed different - not "King Lite" different, but different in a very real way, as if King and Bachman really were different people, different personalities - or at least different sides of the same personality. But they were written as Bachman, published as Bachman, and then revealed to be King. Now that the secret's out and everybody knows who's who, King's continued use of the Bachman name seems almost disrespectful. Even though BLAZE was written during the Bachman years, it was Stephen King who went back and did the touching up. And it was published with the knowledge that everyone already knows Bachman is fictional - that has to have an effect on the way it's written (or in this case, edited).

I've gotta say, I hope BLAZE isn't the last of the Bachman books, no matter what genre he decides to focus on. I prefer BLAZE to any of the newer King, anyway. And now we have DUMA KEY to look forward to...