There’s a thing that happens when Stephen King books come out, and it is this: I buy them and read them. Of course, sometimes they slip by me unnoticed for a little while; and for that matter, sometimes they should. Blockade Billy and its companion piece are not bad stories, by any means. I enjoyed them both! And despite the tiny size of the book, I only paid paperback pricing or so, and even for a book that only took about a day to read the lot of, it’s not like I feel ripped off by undersizedness or anything. The only real problem I have is that the two stories (one about the meteoric rise and precipitous fall of an eponymous baseball catcher, the other about an indecent proposal) are both too short to really count as a book, and now I feel like I should be reading the rest of a short story collection that I do not, in fact, have to hand.

Leave ’em wanting more is one thing, but I’m pretty sure leaving ’em entirely unsatisfied is a bad motto. And it’s a pity, because the first story especially was quite good. I should caveat that it was very baseball-heavy, though, as some people who are insane don’t like baseball.