Blockade Billy

by Stephen King
contains the chilling bonus story “Morality”
(New York: Scribner, 2010)
Hardcover, 132 Pages, Novella and Short Fiction
ISBN: 9781451608212, US$14.99

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

This is for every guy (and gal) who ever put on the gear.

From the Cover: From New York Times bestselling author Stephen King comes the haunting story of Blockade Billy, the greatest Major League baseball player to be erased from the game. Even the most die-hard baseball fans don’t know the true story of William “Blockade Billy” Blakely. He may have been the greatest player the game has ever seen, but today no one remembers his name. He was the first—and only—player to have his existence completely removed from the record books. Even his team is long forgotten, barely a footnote in the game’s history. Every effort was made to erase any evidence that William Blakely played professional baseball, and with good reason. Blockade Billy had a secret darker than any pill or injection that might cause a scandal in sports today. His secret was much, much worse … and only Stephen King, the most gifted storyteller of our age, can reveal the truth to the world, once and for all.

My Review: So, I’ve mentioned it on this blog before, but I really do feel like I am in an abusive relationship with Stephen King, and the two stories in this new volume from King just go to prove that feeling even further. I was initially skeptical when I found out that King was releasing Blockade Billy … after all, the most recent offerings from King have been less than mind-blowing (with the possible exception of UR), and yet some of the advanced hoopla that I read about Billy hinted at a “realistic” story, one that eschewed all of King’s typical trappings of horror, the uncanny and the supernatural, and so—given the fact that King is typically better when he is writing from the heart (The Green Mile anyone?) and that his short fiction is infinitely better than his long—I was intrigued. Though only intrigued enough to put it on hold at the library and let it come with it came.

Surprisingly, I got it fairly quickly (just a day or four after its publication … yes, I am that behind in posting reviews) and given the fact that it is a fairly short read (I think it only took about 90 minutes for me to get through the whole thing) I dove right in. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by what King has managed to create in Billy, granted it is not exactly anything new in the genre of mysterious yet amazing baseball players (I have to say that in this particular genre the X-Files episode “The Unnatural” (written and directed by David Duchovny) does it best), and yet King is able to bring a certain amount of earnestness and sincerity to the story which is a touchstone of King’s novels, but it has been lacking in a lot of his recent releases and so it was nice to see it here again.

That said, however, I felt that the payoff for Billy was less than, shall we say, satisfying and in direct contradiction to my statement above, I wish King had gone the route of some sort of supernatural or uncanny explanation for what was going on in the story because the end just didn’t feel like it was worth all the build up. That is not to say it is a bad book … I just wouldn’t rush out and spend $15 on it. Buy it used, check it out of the library or get somebody else to buy it for you as a gift.

As for the short story “Morality” also contained herein … I dunno … it didn’t make that much of an impression on me, and was a little too heavy handed to be any kind of effective. It hews too much to the old “morality play” style (which I guess it implied in its title) to be really compelling. King is usually best when he is ambiguous and not laying out thick black and white moral lines.