* Reviews: Blockade Billy

April 27, 2010

There’s something supernatural about a review of a book that hasn’t been published yet, but it doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone from opining on Stephen King’s upcoming baseball novella, Blockade Billy.

From Publishers Weekly:

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.

  • From The Washington Post
  • From Superheroes-r-us.com
  • From David Ulin/Los Angeles Times (syndicated)
  • Just going by these brief synopses, there are elements that reminded me of Philip Roth’s underrated baseball fiction, The Great American Novel, as Ulin writes, is built around

    a now-forgotten third major league, the Patriot League, [that has been] expunged from baseball history after having been exposed as a communist front.

    The main part of “The Great American Novel” involves a team from New Jersey, the Port Ruppert Mundys, that suffers through the worst season of all time; “Blockade Billy” too takes place in New Jersey, although the team here, the Newark Titans, appears (at first glance, anyway) to have been blessed instead of cursed. That’s because, as the book begins, the Titans have just brought up a rookie catcher, Bill Blakely, who not only can handle the position but also is possibly the greatest hitter anyone has ever seen.

    But apparently that’s where the similarities end, King being King and all.

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