Stephen King, BLOCKADE BILLY
Blockade Billy by Stephen King
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Billy Blakely is a 6" tall, skinny young man from Iowa who answers a call by the New Jersey Titans for a catcher to replace their regular catcher, who is out of the game for the duration due to serious injury. At first, George Grantham, equipment manager and third-base coach for the Titans, has his doubts about Billy, who, slow-witted and a little "off," doesn't seem big enough, tough enough to cut the mustard. But the very first game in which the boy plays proves his mettle in a game to make the history books. With just one fly in the ointment: one member of the opposing team, Billy Anderson, running to home, somehow sustains a ripped ankle and stretched tendon as a result of Billy Blakely's tag. No one's sure how it happened, but as Joe, the team manager, said, it was likely Anderson, who was flipped tail over teakettle by Billy Blakely's block, cut himself with his own spikes. End of story.
Except . . . it wasn't. That season was the eeriest the Titans ever played, losing game after game in spite of the superb play of their new catcher, Billy Blakely -- now called "Blockade Billy" by adoring fans -- ending the season in a grim finale no one could have predicted.
Billy Blakely, you see, has a dark, dark secret, far darker than any of today's baseball scandals. Dark enough that even though he may have been the greatest player the game of baseball has ever known, today only a handful of people, all of them old and nearing death, remember his name. He was the first -- and only -- player to have his very existence 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 "Blockade Billy" Blakely ever played professional baseball, and with good reason -- a reason that Mr. King only ferreted out during an interview with one of the last surviving members of the Titans, George Grantham.
As a story, this tale is, like most of King's work, superb. But it has something in common with King's 2009 novel, Under the Dome -- dedicated Christian-bashing savage enough to hint that perhaps Blockade Billy was written for just that purpose: as a vehicle for a savage attack on Christians and Christianity.
Which should have been beneath King, but, unfortunately, apparently wasn't. Why he hasn't gone on similar tears against, e.g., Islamists or other, non-Christian fundamentalists isn't evident here or elsewhere. Nor has King, supposedly a feminist, ever gone after the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), one of the most savage, unjust, and cruel -- even lethally so -- anti-woman practices that has ever existed, just shy of vaginal impalement as a method of slow execution of women because they are women. Crazy as some of the supposedly Christian groups in this country may be -- the Westboro Baptist Church comes to mind -- none of them have fallen to that. Yet King has blinders on that allow him to focus his antireligious ire solely on Christians and Christianity. And it's beginning to pall, even for this non-Christian. For which reason I give Blockade Billy two stars. As a story, it deserved five stars. As a nasty, vicious, underheaded jab at Christians and Christianity, it really doesn't deserve any.
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