Blaze enters NY Times at #2

BevVincent

1 A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, by Khaled Hosseini. (Riverhead, $25.95.) A friendship between two women in Afghanistan against the backdrop of 30 years of war.

2 BLAZE, by Richard Bachman. (Scribner, $25.) An early Stephen King novel — Bachman is his alias — here revised. A criminal who was an abused child plots a kidnapping.

BevVincent

SCHIZONOMIA: The new Stephen King — excuse me, Richard Bachman — novel, “Blaze,” is No. 2 on the fiction list. There was a time, two decades ago, when King worked hard to pretend he wasn’t Bachman. (He even issued a fake author photo on the 1984 novel “Thinner.”)



Once he was fully outed as Bachman, a press release announced Bachman’s death from “cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia.” The new Bachman novel includes a funny and come-as-you-are foreword from King. It begins: “This is a trunk novel, O.K.? I want you to know that while you’ve still got your sales slip and before you drip something like gravy or ice cream on it, and thus make it difficult or impossible to return. It’s a revised and updated trunk novel, but that doesn’t change the basic fact. The Bachman name is on it because it’s the last novel from 1966-1973, which was that gentleman’s period of greatest productivity.” King also notes that the proceeds from “Blaze” will go to something called the Haven Foundation, “created to help freelance artists who are down on their luck.” You can almost hear an earlier generation of broke-then-failed novelists asking: Where was that thing when I needed it?



(This column refers to the best-sellers lists dated July 1, 2007. On the Web, the lists are available one week ahead of the print edition of the Book Review.)