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I like baseball so this might be a bit biased.

I do NOT like baseball so much that I thought King’s “Faithful” was an exciting read, but I do like baseball and a common critique I hear about this story is that it’s boring because it focuses on, well, baseball.

But I love it. This is a novella written as an interview transcript. The interviewee, a character talking to King himself, is giving his memories on a player called Blockade Billy. It documents their season and ends about how you would expect a Stephen King story to end.

This isn’t the first time King has done stories written as transcripts (Dolores Claiborne was a whole NOVEL written as one) but I could see how it would throw some people off.

Look: I get why people might not like this story.

It’s short, it’s not horror in King’s traditional sense, it’s a transcript, and it’s about baseball.

But I think it’s great. It reminded me of those 1990s Disney sports movies, documenting the dramatic rise of the underdog to a big ending (though the endings are quite different) and I thought it was very exciting. It felt weird to get this nostalgic hit for DISNEY movies while reading KING but it happened.

Also, if you’re struggling with the transcript angle of the story (same for Dolores), I recommend checking your favorite audiobook sources for it because the narrator is very good and gives the transcript a lot of life and drama.

I think this is easily one of King’s hidden gems. People see the cover, shudder because they don’t like baseball, and dismiss it. But they shouldn’t be so fast because there’s a lot to love in this little novella.

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If there was ever a toe-in-the-water to the Fear Street series, this is it. It’s also the only copy of a classic Fear Street in size, cover, and price at my local Books-A-Million and I can’t help but feel that’s because it doesn’t bring the scares (or, really, much of anything).

The story centers on a douche of a dude who is so self-centered and full of himself that he challenges himself to date twins within a specific time frame. They both fall in love with him and begin to play off each other while a third sister - an EVIL sister - is thrown into the mix.

The only thing I kept thinking throughout the whole book is that SURELY sisters would talk to each other more. I mean, I wasn’t particularly close to my brother when we were teenagers, but we knew who each other was dating.

It wasn’t a dumb book per se, but it wasn’t anything special.

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It’s super interesting to read a philosopher’s take on how he thought Covid would impact our culture as a whole.

He was wrong, but I think we all were. I distinctly remember thinking that Covid could - for all the heartache and death it brought with it - also bring a reframing of our lives and a refreshed priority list to all of us. We could really take a moment and breathe for a bit, look around, and evaluate whether we as a society are okay with the grind that is modernity.

Turns out yes, people were okay with it. Well. Rich people were okay with it. As so often happens, the curtain lifted a bit to show that that so-called “unskilled labor force,” is actually holding up civilization while the rich just pretend to do important things.

At this point, Covid feels like a wasted opportunity to right an awful lot of wrongs.

Edit: I wrote the above in 2022 and I feel like I’ve just gotten more radicalized year after year from my disappointment in all of us as a society. We could have done so much. We could currently be in such a better place. But no, the workforce was forced to cave to the rich, showing their trick of limiting wages to barely livable also meant that nobody had the opportunity to reject the systems that they set up.

We were set up, exploited, and manipulated and words cannot express just how fucking angry I am about the whole thing because now there are ZERO silver linings or redeeming values to Covid19. Just a whole lot of unnecessary death and tighter grip on the people by corporations and billionaires.

It kills me, man. I’m not even kidding. I hate it and it breaks my heart every. single. day.

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