Blockade Billy
Stephen King
Storyville
<p>"I love old-school baseball,and I also love the way people who've spent a lifetime in the game talk about the game. I tried to combine those things in a story of suspense. People have asked me for years when I was going to write a baseball story. Ask no more; this is it." -- Stephen King<br></p><p>Even the most diehard baseball fans don't know the true story of William "Blockade Billy" Blakely.<br></p><p>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.<br></p><p>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.<br></p><p>This Kindle edition features both the cover illustration by Glen Orbik and the interior artwork of Alex McVey from the limited hardcover edition published by Cemetery Dance Publications.<br></p>From Publishers Weekly<p>A quirky baseball player with a past shrouded in secrecy is the tragic hero of this macabre tale from the dark side of the all-American sport. In the voice of George "Granny" Grantham, retired third-base coach of the New Jersey Titans, King (Under the Dome) recalls the spring of 1957, when Billy Blakely, a catcher called up from their Titans' Iowa farm system, helped to boost the team out of the basement and add some excitement to the national pastime. Billy hits with such power and guards the plate with such determination (hence his eponymous nickname) that teammates are willing to forgive such eccentricities as his frequently addressing himself in the third person, or bloodying runners who collide with him. Of course, these kinks are clues to a shocking pathology that King coaxes out in a narrative steeped so perfectly in the argot of the game and the behavior of its players and fans that readers will willingly suspend their disbelief. As King's fiction goes, this suspenseful short is a deftly executed suicide squeeze, with sharp spikes hoisted high and aimed at the jugular on the slide home. </p>From Booklist<p>Now and again, between his best-selling horror novels, King likes to try his hand at different genres, usually in shorter formats published by small presses. He did it in 2005 with a pulp yarn called The Colorado Kid from Hard Case Crime, and now he does it again with a baseball novella from Cemetery Dance. The story of Blockade Billy, whose brief career in the big leagues was banished from the record books, is part realistic fiction and part fable, evoking Mark Harris’ baseball novels, the work of W. P. Kinsella, and George Plimpton’s The Curious Case of Sid Finch (1987). In the mid-1950s, the fictional New Jersey Titans came out of spring training with no catchers, forcing the team to bring up an unheralded rookie from the minors. Naive country boy William Blakeley quickly establishes himself as the real deal—hitting a ton and blocking home plate with a ferocity that earns him the nickname Blockade Billy. But what is that curious Band-Aid he sometimes wears on his finger, and why do players seem to get hurt whenever he wears it? King nails the baseball argot perfectly, and he sprinkles in enough references to real-life 1950s players to have baby-boomer fans reaching for their old ball cards. The tale is narrated by the Titans’ former third-base coach, who is the second coming of the cranky but good-hearted manager in Bull Durham. For fans of fifties baseball and of baseball fiction and film, this deft pastiche makes a great way to celebrate a new season. --Bill Ott </p></br></br></br></br></br>