Horror-meister Stephen King steps up to the plate

"Things have been nuts here. We've had to go back and do a second printing already," Brian Freeman, the marketing director of Cemetery Dance Publications, tells the Sacramento Bee . Freeman was referring to interest in the announcement, timed to coincide with the opening day of the Major League Baseball season today, that horror writer Stephen King is to release a baseball-themed novella called Blockade Billy on 20 April. King (below) is a baseball aficionado and Red Sox fan who has referenced the sport in his work (the baseball bat with which Wendy Torrance bludgeons Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining is signed by Carl Yastrzemski – a Red Sox player) but not written fiction about it overtly before. He tells the paper: "I love old-school baseball, and I also love the way people who've spent a lifetime in the game talk about the game. I tried to combine those things in a story of suspense. People have asked me for years when I was going to write a baseball story. Ask no more; this is it." The plot revolves around the titular William Blakely and his career, of which "every effort was made to erase any evidence that [he] played professional baseball". In a sport not averse to bad publicity, interest has centred on what new horror King might reveal for baseball when he describes Blockade Billy as having "a secret darker than any pill or injection that might cause a scandal in sports today. His secret was much, much worse …"