My local Borders ordered in so many copies of this book when it first came out you’d think it was a new addition to the Harry Potter universe. In fact, it was awarded the same prominent stand given over to the Bree Tanner “Eclipse novella” just a short time later. Now, I’m not suggesting, here, that Stephen King doesn’t have the same readership as either Rowling or Meyer, and doesn’t warrant like promotion and, therefore, like sales. But I do wonder just how many people Borders thought would want to dish out the price of two full paperbacks for what is, essentially, a short story in hardcover format. And a short story in a small hardcover format of less than 100 pages and of which none of the proceeds appear to be earmarked for charity.

True, I bought it. But only once it was on sale. And even only then because I realized I had left the book I had been reading at home, and needed a little something to tide me over on the bus ride back.

Is this a good short story? Oh, absolutely. Well-told and suspenseful and macabre and captivating, effortlessly creepy and skillfully shocking. It’s exciting, too, a blend of Underdog Sports Hero and Crazed Psychopath that is positively gripping.

At first, I didn’t think this story and I were going to get along well at all. You see, on the very first page, there is an Incident. An Incident in which our narrator, later identified as one George “Granny” Grantham, refers to the person he is speaking to as “Mr. King.” Oh, dear. Turns out this isn’t a narration, it’s a transcript. How tiresome, I thought. And I thought that because I hate it when an author puts himself into a fictional tale. Only Douglas Coupland has, up till now, managed to do so without raising my ire, and even that is just because Douglas Coupland could probably pen a True Crime Western featuring time paradoxes, an Alternate History where the South won the Civil War, and a Prologue that tells us how things end (all my pet literary peeves) and I’d still want to marry it. Stephen King does not similarly bask in the glow of my unconditional love, but, nevertheless, I admit I was wrong. Mr. King’s shadowy presence in the story isn’t tiresome at all. Nothing about this story is.

It is the story of youthful William Blakely, a fearless yet dull-witted baseball player in the 50’s. He was called up from the minors to play for the New Jersey Titans (um… they’re fictional, right?) and the reason, we are given to understand, that we have not now any memory of his notable escapades on the field -- despite his incredible skill as a catcher and impressive batting average -- is that something so deeply unspeakable occurred regarding this simple and strange young man that his name has been thoroughly expunged from the record books.

But Granny had once been the 3rd base coach and equipment manager of the Titans -- “It was a smaller game then,” he explains, self-deprecatingly -- so he well knows the details of the spectacular rise and fall of the star player known as Blockade Billy.

At first, it feels a lot like the “Junior High sports book” Granny dismissively claims it isn’t, the Cinderella story of an Iowa farmboy who makes it in the Big Leagues and brings his team up from the basement and into contention. If years of watching sports movies have taught me anything, it’s that the team will go on to win the Big Game, and at least one player will find the love of his life in the process. That is, if this story weren’t written by Stephen King.

But for all that it is written by Stephen King, thus we know from the first that the off-kilter Billy is not destined to get the fairytale Hall of Fame ending such a story would usually dish up, but Blockade Billy is still very much about baseball. Yes, it’s given the Kingian treatment, made dark and sinister, but it also reads like a baseball history lesson wrapped up in gruesome recollection, and I think it is the evocation of baseball’s glory days that I really enjoyed the most about this tale.

But why should I, an Australian, care about baseball’s glory days? Well, my tenure living in New York left me with three things: a profound love of whitefish, a fascination with the humidity percentage, and a devotion to the Mets. But for all that I love my team, I did not grow up with baseball. Cricket’s our national sport, and so while I can identify the difference between fielding positions silly mid on and deep midwicket, can tell you when the first One Day International match was played, and can, of course, name every Australian cricketing captain since before I was born, I know nothing about baseball history -- and what little I do know is I gleaned from The Babe, The Natural and A League of Their Own. So, seriously, I appreciated King’s insights, and was utterly swept up in foul-mouthed Granny’s dizzying remembrances of time gone by.

As the story came to an end -- not quite as I’d imagined it might, but not far off, either -- I realized that I had missed my stop, having been so lost in his recitation. I looked up to see the woman across from me smiling as she gestured to the book.

“Good, huh?” she asked.

I nodded, still in something of a daze.

“Read the second one yet?”

“No,” I replied.

“Don’t,” she said simply, as I stood to get off.

I wish I’d listened. But I had a while to wait for the bus going back the other way, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and start in on the random, not-at-all-related “Chilling Bonus Story” tacked onto the end almost as an afterthought. I finished it, deeply squicked out, just as the bus arrived.

And all I will say is this: Don’t.

  -- Rachel Hyland

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