Blockade Billy, Stephen King

"Even the most die-hard baseball fans don’t know the true story of William “Blockade Billy” Blakely. He may have been the greatest player the game has ever seen, but today no one remembers his name. He was the first--and only--player to have his existence completely removed from the record books. Even his team is long forgotten, barely a footnote in the game’s history.

Every effort was made to erase any evidence that William Blakely played professional baseball, and with good reason. Blockade Billy had a secret darker than any pill or injection that might cause a scandal in sports today. His secret was much, much worse... and only Stephen King, the most gifted storyteller of our age, can reveal the truth to the world, once and for all."

I managed to pull this from a chance visit to Waconia Library in Minnesota, and figured that at a hundred pages or so I could read it in an evening. It actually took a little less time, as it turned out that the book is actually two short stories, rather than a single piece.

Blockade Billy is the story of a historically significant, minor league baseball player with a dark secret. King's key strength has always been the way he can evoke character in just a few lines of dialogue, and the telling of this tale (by an old man, to Stephen King, in a bar) is an excellent way for him to immediately invest a truthfulness to the story which gives it a real shine. It helps that King writes about baseball so effectively that even when I had no clue what was being spoken about, I still felt invested. The pacing of the story, unlike baseball as a game, is relentless.

The second story, a much shorter piece called Morality, is a little harder to describe, but basically boils down to what impact does an evil deed done for money have on the life of two otherwise ordinary people. Whilst King is usually known for his more exuberantly supernatural tales (The Mist, The Shining, IT, Carrie) he also has a fairly firm line in psychological and suspense led horror - real life tales, essentially (think Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Dolores Clayborne, or Geralds Game).

Morality is one of these - a corrosive tale that's more impactful than Blockade Billy for it's simplicity. Told in flat, short prose, it sets up its idea and then lets it run its course. By making the reader implicit in the action, it turns the sedentary voyeurism of the act committed around, and places the weight as much on the reader as the characters.

Also Try:
Stephen King, The Dark Tower Series, any short story collection
Michael Chabon, Summerlands
Michael Lewis, Moneyball

The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem

"Trurl and Klapaucius are the archrival constructor robots, who, ransacking myth, technology and the secrets of cybernetic generation, race to create an invention even more improbable than the last."

















The Cyberiad is a collection of translated short stories from Russian Sci-Fi master Stanislaw Lem, who's probably most famous for Solaris. It follows the tales (and tales within tales) of the inventor Trurl and his misadventures within the application of his craft.

Featuring everything from the invention of a beast that can defy death for a hunting party, to a storytelling machine telling stories of Trurl and the stories he knows. There's a sense of playful inventiveness on display which is wonderfully enjoyable. None of the stories outstay their welcome, at around 20 pages each they're very short indeed. Even the longest of them involves the sleight of hand trick of building stories into further stories, a trick that Lem adores.

There's a sheer joyfulness to the world building on display, a love of language and wordplay that means that every story features intricate puns and the vocal equivalent of sight gags. To say these are great stories undermines them, they show more regard for the subtleties and depth of English than most writers manage. That this is a translated work speaks to the power of the writing; I don't know quite how much of the original text survived here, but there are enough rhymes, half rhymes and flights of surreal connections to impress.

The person who lent this to me described it as a Polish Douglas Adams. That's a perfect comparison, and frankly, when that's the person that springs to mind, you're in a good place.

Also Try:
Sergei Lukyanko, Night Watch
Douglas Adams, Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy
Terry Pratchett, The Bromelliad Trilogy