Blaze

Blaze is a novel by the American writer Stephen King, published in 2007 under the name Richard Bachman.

An early draft of the book went to Doubleday at the same time as 'Salem's Lot, and the publisher took the other novel, which left this one in a drawer as a trunk novel for three decades. King returned to the manuscript before publication and stripped out what he judged to be its over-sentimentality. The 2007 volume also includes a short story called Memory, first published in 2006, which King later reworked into Duma Key.

Blaze is a large man with a long history of institutions and petty crime behind him, and the plan he is following belongs to somebody else. George is still present to him as an adviser rather than only as a memory, and the two of them go through the kidnapping step by step. The money is meant to buy a future that Blaze cannot quite picture, and the child at the centre of the scheme is the part of it he has thought about least.