Balls

Books:

Blockade Billy by Stephen King (2010): We get the titular novella and another novella, "Morality", which recently appeared in Esquire, all in a nice little hardcover package meant to suggest the children's sports novels of King's youth. Given that this just came out, I'd hazard a guess that Scribner's is aiming at the Father's Day crowd with this baseball-centric package.

King's chameleon voice hums along quite nicely in the title novella, a first-person narrative of a forgotten rookie baseball player of the 1950's. "Blockade" Billy was a rookie phenom of a catcher for the (fictional) New Jersey Titans in the 1950's, and the then-third-base coach of the Titans tells the story of Billy's magical month in the majors to, unh, Stephen King, who's really been showing up a lot in his own fiction lately.

The coach thinks and speaks a lot in archaic cliches -- this is entirely appropriate and, sometimes, appropriately annoying. But one gets a nice feel for baseball back in the 1950's, especially the whims and vagaries of how the farm system worked back then. I enjoyed "Blockade Billy" a lot, though the thriller aspects of it could just as easily have been cut: the 'twist' is really the weakest thing about an otherwise enjoyable piece.

The novella "Morality" operates in its own sub-genre of What Would You Do For Money? It's minor King, though in many ways it's superior to A Simple Plan, a novel and movie it resembles in its concerns, though not its plot or characters. Recommended.


Darker by Simon Clark (1996): This enjoyable, early-career Clark horror/thriller almost seems like it was written on a dare. Why? Because the basic premise -- and the engine that drives the plot -- involves a family being chased across the English countryside by what amounts to a giant, malevolent, invisible ball. The ball can crush anything. A mysterious stranger who goes along with the family may know how to stop the ball -- or he, too, may be malevolent. In the meantime, there's that ball, inexorably catching up with the family again and again and doing a whole lot of crushing. And you know, it works, it really works -- and would make an equally rivetting movie in the right hands. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball! Highly recommended.


The Rising by Brian Keene (2004): The sub-sub-genre of talking zombies is well-represented by Keene's post-zombie-apocalyptic novel in which a father desperate to save his son has to travel several hundred miles through hordes of annoying, talking, gun-wielding zombies. Oh, and all wildlife above the level of insects also becomes zombiefied immediately after dying.

The zombies in this case have a quasi-scientific/supernatural explanation -- basically, they're demons who escaped from hell after a military supercollider experiment went horribly awry and ripped a hole in the side of the universe. And it's pretty much a rule of thumb that no experiment that ever ripped a hole in the universe ever ripped that hole through to someplace good, like the magical land of snuggle-elves or what-have-you. It's pretty much always monsters and demons. Keene's one of a handful of contemporary horror writers who can lay on the sex and violence (and sexual violence) without making things cheap or sordid. In a weird way, his novel is much like The Road, only the apocalypse makes a lot more sense (relatively speaking). Highly recommended.

Don't Stop Believing

Comics:

Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire Volume 2 by William Messner-Loebs and Nadine Messner-Loebs: Journey, published first by Aardvark-Vanaheim and then by Fantagraphics, is one of the ten or twenty great comic books of the 1980's. It followed the adventures of hunter/trapper/postman/gun-for-hire Joshua "Wolverine" MacAlistaire in the wilds, the settlements and the forts of Michigan and environs in the early 19th century. It's a funny and character-driven book, the humour and character observation making themselves felt through both the writing and the delightful cartooning. The comparison most often made in reviews at the time was that the writing and art reminded one of Will Eisner. It's an apt comparison, though I also see a lot of Harvey Kurtzman in Messner-Loebs' art.

William Messner-Loebs wrote and drew the approximately 40 issues that make up the entire saga, now collected by IDW in two fat B&W volumes. The story structure is guided by MacAlistaire's wanderings -- while moving from place to place, he also attempts to deliver a mysterious package -- with a number of side-stories spinning off from the main narrative, as the book turns its attentions to the various settlers, soldiers, natives, Sasquatches, squirrels and comic grotesques whom MacAlistaire comes across.

Probably the most memorable character -- other than stubborn, clever MacAlistaire himself -- is writer/poet Elmer Alwyn Craft, an East Coast naif pretty much way out of his element in the wilderness. Craft begins as a parody of/homage to the writings and personal lives of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, but he soon becomes a distinct (and often distinctly annoying) character of his own. Craft also allows for some fairly sophisticated, understated play with the nature of history and stories -- his tendency to look for a narrative in events is repeatedly undercut by MacAlistaire's observations that life doesn't operate that way.

Various seismic shifts in the independent comics business would cause Messner-Loebs to end Journey perhaps before its time (though it does have an ending and an epilogue), and he would move on to work on mainstream characters that included the Flash and Wonder Woman. The two volumes of Journey stand as a great and idiosyncratic achievement, however, and also work wonderfully as Comics For People Who Don't Like Comics. My only real quibble with the reprint volumes is that they don't reproduce the covers of the original single issues. Hopefully, if sales are good, this could be rectified in a subsequent edition. Highest recommendation.


Justice League of America: Another Nail by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer: Writer/artist Davis's second exploration of a world where Superman didn't 'become' Superman until nearly a decade after his first 'real' comic-book appearance continues in high-epic, anything-goes mode. Raised by Amish parents, Superman finds the modern world confusing and difficult; the modern world, meanwhile, suspicious of super-heroes for decades in a Superman-less world, rushes to embrace the new hero. Meanwhile, some giant thingamabob is about to destroy the universe. Uh oh! Fun, breezy superhero stuff. It's too bad Davis didn't come from around these parts so that we could have gotten a few Super-Mennonite jokes, but so it goes. Recommended.