[Ed. note: This review has already appeared in a slightly different form on my LibraryThing page as well as on Facebook. Just in case you’re keeping track of every place I appear on the InterWebs.]
Blockade Billy is the latest work from Stephen King, perhaps my single favorite author; it’s an uncharacteristically slim volume comprising two novella-length works.
The title story is narrated by an elderly baseball coach as he relates the tale of a (deliberately) forgotten player from the 1950s, a rookie catcher who was brilliant at the game but harbored a terrible secret. King pulls off the improbable trick of keeping a reader who has no interest in sports (me) turning the pages through descriptions of plays that would have been tedious, if not incomprehensible, in another writer’s hands. However, the mystery at the heart of the story doesn’t build beyond a mild curiosity and the big revelation at the end is a let-down, lacking the author’s usual punch and suggesting this story was really just an exercise in capturing an old man’s voice and the rhythms of a game that King clearly loves. In those goals, at least, it succeeds. As a story, not so much.
The second half of the volume, “Morality,” has an interesting premise: Would you be willing to do an immoral thing for a large sum of badly needed money, and, if so, what would be the consequences on your psyche (or your soul, I suppose) and your marriage? Would it make any difference if you weren’t religious? Or is morality something that transcends belief in God? Unfortunately, it’s a premise that seemed all too familiar to me, recalling the film Indecent Proposal, among other things, and the actual immoral act the protagonists are called to perform is so random and ultimately so minor in nature that I couldn’t help but wonder what the big deal was. Yes, what they do is crappy and unquestionably wrong, but it didn’t seem all that horrible — they didn’t kill anyone, it didn’t involve sex, and no permanent damage was done. Perhaps this was King’s point, that even the smallest actions can have hugely corrosive effects, but I simply didn’t buy it as it was developed. The reactions of the characters seemed overblown for what they’d actually done.
Overall, Blockade Billy is a disappointment, a minor effort from an author who can do better, but sadly seems to be growing more and more inconsistent with age. Of course, he’s churned out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of words over the past 40 years, so eventually the creative well has got to run low…
** 1/2 out of *****
