Review of Blockade Billy by Stephen King: A Mini Review for a Mini Book

I’ve been debating the purchase of a Kindle or a Nook for a while.  My Dad & Uncle have Kindles and they love them.  My co-workers have Nooks and they love them.  While I agree that an e-book reader would offer many conveniences, I love borrowing books from the library so I don’t have to pay for them, and I don’t have to store them afterwards.  Imagine my elation when I found out that I can download e-books from the library for FREE onto my iPod.  So I’ve been experimenting with it.  One of my first downloads was Blockade Billy, a novella by Stephen King. Aside from his non-fiction book On Writing, I’ve never read any Stephen King before, although I have seen a few movies based on his books.  I stress a few here, because I’m not really a horror flick fan, but I did love Shawshank Redemption and the Green Mile.  A friend of mine was recently telling me that she and her husband were both big Stephen King fans, and so I thought I needed to give Mr. King a chance.  Enter Blockade Billy…the only Stephen King novel available on the library e-book list when I logged on the other night. 
 

It is a novella, so very short, as will be the review.  It is told as a narrative, as if an old-timey baseball manager is telling Stephen King the story first hand.  The narrator even addresses him as “Mr. King” throughout the story.  I loved the narrator’s vernacular and his perspective on the story being told, and I enjoyed the narrative structure in itself.  A little foreshadowing lets you know that something dreadful is going to happen with the rookie known as “Blockade Billy.”  I enjoyed the story up until you find out what that dreadful thing was.  And then once you know that to which they’ve been alluding this whole time, I thought…What?  Seriously?  This is it?  It just felt forced to me.  In all fairness, it could just be that I didn’t like what happened, so I only felt like it was forced for that reason.  Either way, I’m torn as to whether I liked or disliked this book.  I guess overall, I enjoyed it, even if I wasn’t thrilled with the way the story turned in the end.  It was a fun quick read, but I’m glad I got it for free from the library rather than paying $8.99 to download it to a Kindle on Amazon.

And I promise I’ll give Mr. King another chance.  J