8 Alternative Endings To Stephen King Novels That Were Originally Planned

King's 2007 novel was actually written in the early 1970s, before Carrie, offering the original draft to his publishers at the same time as 'Salem's Lot. When they chose the latter, King set his manuscript aside and sat on it for over 20 years.

Before finally publishing it, King did more than just change a few individual scenes, but rather rewrote and re-edited much of the book from cover-to-cover to remove what he perceived as "over-sentimentality". Since the book was originally written under King "Richard Bachman" persona, it had a different tone and feel than the rest of his works that readers had gotten used to. As King said in a 2007 interview.

"I have been thinking about [Blaze] off and on for a while and every time I would think about it... you know I did the early books as Richard Bachman books and this is going to be a Bachman because it came from the same time. It was written right before Carrie and finally I thought to myself... the reason I've never done it was because, in my memory at least, it was a tearjerker of a book, you know it was kind of sentimental and just kind of... every now and then I think of what Oscar Wilde said about The Little Match Girl. He said that it's impossible to read about the little match girl without weeping tears of laughter and... you know something that is so sad it's actually funny."

As of 2020, King has yet to release the original "Bachman" version of his novel.