Blockade Billy, by Stephen King: A Review

A simple story, well told.

Blockade Billy tells the tale of William Blakely, perhaps the greatest baseball player ever to put on the gear, and who was summarily erased from the record books and forgotten by the world. King’s novella is primarily concerned with the questions raised by these opposing histories: why Blakely was the greatest, and what made him disappear. The answers lie in George Grantham, former third baseman coach and equipment manager for the New Jersey Titans. Grantham – Granny – spins his story of the 1957 season that introduced William Blakely to the big leagues. It’s an uninterrupted first-person narrative, the kind King used to great success in Dolores Claiborne, and that success is matched here. Only Granny isn’t speaking to fictional, off-screen listeners is Blockade Billy; instead, King cleverly inserts himself as the one taking dictation. While King’s presence doesn’t intrude (he is only mentioned by name three or four times), it adds a certain verisimilitude to a story one believes actually, tragically, could happen.

Clever, too, is the setup. King tackles old-time baseball the way he tackles prison life in The Green Mile or “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” or the way he tackles small towns in ’Salem’s Lot or Needful Things: he assumes the reader knows nothing about it, and builds from there. One of the subtle pleasures of Blockade Billy is that readers don’t have to be baseball fanatics to love the story; similarly to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the reader is given just enough information so that one cares about the outcome of the game as much as the characters do. Unlike in Faithful, King does not overwhelm the reader with baseball lore and stats. He is instead concerned with getting you invested in the suspense of what’s happening, and why.

That suspense lies at the heart of Blockade Billy. Stephen King has long been a master of the action sequence, those amped-up moments of intensity that make the rest of the story feel like a single held breath. Witness the dog attacks in Cujo, the painting sequences in Duma Key, or the psychic flashes in The Dead Zone. Here, the same treatment is given to Blockade Billy’s baseball games … and what happens when someone on the opposing team goes up against Billy directly. Billy’s single-minded devotion to baseball and to his team drives these scenes, spiking in what seems to be inevitable violence. It’s not whether the Titans win or lose, it’s how Blockade Billy plays the game. And the crowd eats it up.

So many of King’s fascinations are on display here, and it’s a delight for longtime readers to see them deconstructed and reassembled into this fantastic new book. Blood sport has been central to King’s imagination since The Long Walk; even though Blockade Billy focuses on baseball instead of dystopian-future game shows, blood does indeed spill. In his depictions of the crowd’s enthrallment with violence, King recalls The Running Man and, again, The Long Walk. A startling scene near the end brings to mind certain scenes in Hearts In Atlantis, and King’s ongoing interest in the William Golding book Lord of the Flies. If the technique is reminiscent of Dolores Claiborne, the voice is similar to that of Paul Edgecombe’s in The Green Mile, or even the older men describing the central mystery of The Colorado Kid.

In fact, Blockade Billy – whose cover, like that of The Colorado Kid, was painted by the amazing Glen Orbik – almost works as a spiritual cousin to King’s Hard Case Crime outing. Though the stories are wildly different, they read the same, and have the same feel. There are two essential differences here, though: first, the mystery of Blockade Billy is never asserted as a mystery. The reader has only just begun asking serious questions about the central character before the truth begins to emerge. And second, the truth does emerge. Unlike the origins of that body on the beach in The Colorado Kid, just where Blockade Billy came from and how he got there are startlingly revealed.

Coming so close on the heels of a mammoth novel like Under the Dome, Blockade Billy is refreshingly slender. It’s short enough for a reader to gulp down in one sitting, and compelling enough that he or she is helpless to do anything but. A small masterpiece of voice, pacing, and situation, Blockade Billy once again proves that Stephen King is a master of the novella.

Wetware: On the Digital Frontline With Stephen King

Cemetery Dance Publications Announces WETWARE: ON THE DIGITAL FRONTLINE WITH STEPHEN KING, by Kevin Quigley

WETWARE: On the Digital Frontline with Stephen King
a chapbook by Kevin Quigley

About the Chapbook:
Stephen King has long been at the forefront of experimental publishing. As the world grows more digital each day, King has consistently remained on the edge of breakthrough trends and technology, finding new ways to publish and interpret his stories. King's digital journey has been strange and fascinating. Wetware is your guide.

From the prehistory of King’s involvement with digital media such as the Dark Half video game and F13 to his online release of the lost work, The Cannibals, Wetware covers it all — in a concise and engaging pocket history. Explore the controversy surrounding King's online serial publication, The Plant. Relive the groundbreaking excitement of King's landmark e-book publication, Riding the Bullet. If you ever engaged in interactive fiction with The Mist, were intrigued by the Kindle-only release of "UR," or terrified by the motion comic "N.," Wetware is essential reading.

To read more about Wetware or order your copy today, visit the Wetware purchase site on Cemetery Dance today!

About the Author:

Kevin Quigley's website, Charnel House has been a premiere Stephen King resource for nearly fifteen years. Charnel House was the first website to feature full-length reviews of every Stephen King book; today, it also includes up-to-date King news, a section focused on books about King, and a comprehensive listing of unpublished and uncollected shorter works. Quigley is also the author of two previous chapbooks on King — Chart of Darkness and Ink In the Veins — and co-wrote the upcoming Stephen King Illustrated Movie Trivia Book. In addition to his works on King, Quigley is also the author of several novels, and has recently published a collection of poetry, Foggy At Night In the City. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his partner, Shawn.

All In Good Time

I managed to get my hands on an early copy of the new Barenaked Ladies album today, and before you call me a thief and a pirate, know that I preordered the album from iTunes and my paid copy is coming to me next Tuesday. There were some advantages to preordering, namely that I got one track early (“Every Subway Car”), and two tracks – “All In Good Time” and “She Turned Away” – were only available if you did the whole preorder thing. Those bonus tracks didn’t come with my early copy, so I’m going to the opposite of the Bruce Springsteen message board and reserve judgment on them until after I hear them.

All In Good Time is BNL’s first album without Steven Page, and regardless of whether you like the record or not, the absence is immediately noticeable. Ed Robertson has a perfectly fine voice, but Steve had a very distinctive voice, and going a whole BNL album without it will take getting used to. Kevin Hearn, who also has a very distinctive voice (a little thin, but definitely interesting), steps up with lead vocals on three tracks. Jim Creeggan, who provided one or two odd tracks on BNL’s earlier albums, and the interesting “Peterborough and the Kawarthas” on the more recent Barenaked Ladies Are Me, offers up two lead vocals here. This democratic voicework is fresh and interesting – I like that BNL has been moving back to this since BLAM – but I’m not sure how successful it is here.

Unfortunately, because Ed’s voice is mellow and unassuming, a few of the tracks on All In Good Time sound remarkably similar. Despite different musical directions, songs like “Ordinary,” “I Have Learned,” and “How Long” border on indistinct. Even the slow-jam groove of “Summertime,” can’t quite escape the samey-ness.

Kevin Hearn’s offerings suffer a bit, too, although with only three tracks to work with, they do so less. Though “Watching the Northern Lights” is the only unlistenable song on the album, “Another Heartbreak” is sweet and sad, and “Jerome” is terrific: a slow calypso that ranks among, say, “Hidden Sun” and “Another Spin” as Hearn’s best. Creeggan’s two songs – “On the Lookout” and “I Saw It” – are perfectly fine, the latter perhaps about Steve Page’s leaving the group.

Ed Robertson, too, has some issues with Steve’s absence; Ed Robertson is most comfortable here when he’s angry. “You Run Away” is pissed-off and plaintive, and “Golden Boy” is a raging screed. One can’t help but wonder if both are about Steve Page’s decision to abandon the band. “The Love We’re In” is also good, musically recalling Stunt’s “Long Way Back Home” and lyrically romantic and devastating. “Four Seconds” sounds the most like what people expect from BNL: a fast-paced novelty song in the vein of “One Week,” but its staccato rhymes (Ed manages to rhyme “orange” not once but four times) never make the song feel rote or compulsory. All In Good Time might have benefitted from more of this sort of idiosyncrasy.

As it stands, All In Good Time is a good album, not a great one. Maybe four of its songs – “Golden Boy,” “You Run Away,” “Jerome,” and “Four Seconds” – can stand among their best work, with two or three more perfectly good songs. It’s an interesting new direction for the band, and I’m intrigued to see where they go from here; I just wish their first step without Steve Page hadn’t been as shaky.

The Princess and the Blog

Thank God for Twitter. Until just before lunch, I had forgotten The Princess and the Frog had come out on DVD today. My temp job is right near one of those maxi-mini-malls, with two big anchor stores and a bunch of depressing eateries and closet stores that lurch gaspingly toward significance and never quite make it. Happily for me, the two anchor stores were Best Buy and Target, which meant the inherent glee of comparison shopping and coming out three dollars ahead by going an extra twenty feet to Target. Which, by the by, also has a Starbucks inside of it, rendering this temp position not nearly as desolately located as I’d assumed.

But getting back to the purchase itself, let’s talk a moment about The Princess and the Frog. This was the film that was supposed to usher in the Third Disney Renaissance; its return to hand-drawn animation, a musical structure, and an emphasis on Princess Tiana being the first African-American Disney Princess were supposed to do for the Animation division what The Little Mermaid did in 1989. (Some insist the second Renaissance began earlier, with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, making the modern-era corollary Bolt, the first Disney film under the purview of Pixar creative chief John Lasseter.)

The reality didn’t play out exactly as Disney hoped. It was critically lauded – Time magazine voted it the best film of the year – and the box office seemed promising. In its opening weekend, it debuted at #1 at the box office and became the highest-grossing animated film ever released in December. It went on to gross $104,000,000 domestically, which would have been seen as a blockbuster as recently as three years ago, but now seemed disappointing in an era where success seems to begin at $200M. A less dubious detraction was that the budget of the film was almost exactly its gross, meaning that – domestically, at least – the film only broke even. However, accounting for worldwide totals, the film actually came out well ahead, grossing $247M globally.

Even so, Disney saw this movie as a failure – perhaps because so much had been riding on it. Many factors were blamed, but what seems to have unfortunately gained traction is the notion that the film wasn’t universal enough – i.e., didn’t cater to boys. Now, despite the successes of the Pirates of the Caribbean films – and their cross-gender appeal – and the classic roster of characters and films, the Disney Princess brand is one of Disney’s primary moneymakers. It’s so prevalent that they are devoting an entirely new section of Fantasyland in Disney World to them. But theme park and merchandising successes don’t necessarily translate into feature film successes, at least in Disney’s way of thinking.

Therefore, Disney has decided to be proactive with its next film, the long-gestating and highly anticipated film Rapunzel. The film uses breakthrough computer animation, differentiating it from other CGI films by basing its palate on classic paintings. Disney fans have been drooling about the project for over a decade, but now, because of the slightly disappointing returns on The Princess and the Frog, are changing the name … to Tangled.

I think this is a short-sighted decision, especially since the name Rapunzel has such a resonance to it and Tangled is a past-tense verb that just sort of lays there. Maybe it’s meant to evoke Enchanted? Plus, despite names like Snow White and Beauty & the Beast, The Little Mermaid and Cinderella, those films managed to appeal to everyone. It just rankles me that Disney is willing to trade on its legacy of fairy-tale films by changing the name to something so bland.

There is hope, though, starting today. In one of his lecture specials, Kevin Smith referred to theatrical films as “ads for the DVD.” Maybe that will happen here. The Princess and the Frog is a film that will play very well in homes – especially since they’re pushing the Blu-Ray sets (which are the only sets on which you can get special features, another bit of angersome news for those of us without Blu-Ray players). With its release so close to a holiday partially known for gift-giving, this could still take off.

Look, do I have a personal stake in whether a Third Disney Renaissance happens? Sort of. The Princess and the Frog was a damn good movie, and Atlantis and Treasure Planet were not. I’d love it if this kind of creativity and forward-thinking were rewarded in the market, so we can continue to get good, quality projects like this.