"I love old-school baseball,and I also love the way people who've spent a lifetime in the game talk about the game. I tried to combine those things in a story of suspense. People have asked me for years when I was going to write a baseball story. Ask no more; this is it." --Stephen King
Even the most diehard 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.
This eBook edition features both the cover illustration by Glen Orbik and the interior artwork of Alex McVey from the limited hardcover edition published by Cemetery Dance Publications.
From Publishers Weekly (boxed review):
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... 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...a deftly executed suicide squeeze, with sharp spikes hoisted high and aimed at the jugular on the slide home."
