Blaze
- 328
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“Blaze” is a well-written early King crime novel with an unusual hero: slow-witted, good-hearted and seen from the inside. Some readers find the plot too slight for prose of this quality, and others need time to sort out the shifts between timelines. It was drafted before “Carrie”, then reworked and published in 2007 under the Bachman name.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
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. The book also has an annex containing "Memory", a short story that was first published in 2006 and which King has since worked into Duma Key.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.2 across 143 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 49% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Crime & mystery average of 7.6. That is how 7.5 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.1 | 16 | 11% |
| Hardcover | 7.1 | 127 | 89% |
Frequently asked
How long is Blaze?
It has 328 pages — shorter than 78% of the ranked books in Crime & mystery.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Crime & mystery — with scores between 7.4 and 7.5, closest to this book.
