Blockade Billy

April 5, 2010
The first 10,000 copies of Stephen King's baseball novella include a reproduction of the only known baseball card of Billy Blakely, the story's hero.
Blockade Billy
Stephen King
. Cemetery Dance
( www.cemeterydance.com
), $25 (112p) ISBN 978-1-58767-228-6

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 the 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.

May 1, 2010
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 Plimptons 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 dealhitting 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)