Stephen King's alter ego plays it serious

RICHARD BACHMAN may have died of "cancer of the pseudonym," but 22 years after his fey demise, he remains belatedly prolific as manuscripts continue to surface, the latest being "Blaze."

Bachman is the early career alter ego of Stephen King (who was inspired by author Donald E. Westlake's pseudonym Richard Stark and the band Bachman-Turner Overdrive). Bachman is listed as the author of five previous novels, which are harsher and more rugged in tone than books written under King's name but not entirely devoid of King's trademark humanism. Two Bachman novels, "The Long Walk" and "The Running Man," both riffing on Richard Connell's famous 1924 short story, "The Most Dangerous Game," squeeze in camaraderie and John Ford-style swagger, even as the characters are gunned down by stoic soldiers or deceived by the public. However, the violence in Bachman's "first" novel, "Rage," an unusual and underrated tale of high school revenge and empathy, proved too scabrous; King took the book out of print when a copy was discovered in 14-year-old Michael Carneal's locker after he opened fire on praying students at a Kentucky high school in 1997.

"Blaze" is a trunk novel, recently unearthed by one of King's assistants and, like nearly every King cuneiform, rapidly released for public consumption -- but only after being reworked and updated by King. It depicts an attempted baby-napping by a slow-witted Maine drifter named Clayton "Blaze" Blaisdell Jr., a man actuated by money, cute babies and cars painted skylark blue. It bears the telltale marks of an older and more scrupulous King corralling a younger writer's wild ideas. One wonders whether a descriptive attribute like "the washed-out blue of desert skies in a Western movie" comes from an enthusiastic young movie fan or an older cinephile waxing nostalgic for John Sturges.

The plotting has the feel of a barely plausible if enjoyable grind-house movie, but it's hard to resist such delightfully named villains as Martin "The Law" Coslaw, a headmaster more taken with paddling adolescents than introducing them to the benefits of shredded cabbage. There's also an endearing pragmatism to Blaze's kidnapping scheme. As his pal puts it, "A baby can't ID you, so you can return it alive."