New King

I got the trade edition of Stephen King's new novella, Blockade Billy, yesterday (still waiting on the limited edition hardcover to arrive) and read the entire thing in maybe an hour.  The title story is only about 80 pages and the bonus short story, "Morality", only runs another forty or so.  There's no supernatural element to either of the stories, although to me that's not a deal breaker.

You may ask why I bothered to buy both, well, I preordered the limited edition before the announcement of the trade edition because I wanted the novella, and then ordered the trade edition because I wanted the bonus short story.  After having read it, I think I may have just stuck with the limited edition (I'm looking forward to reading it again, with the illustrations), but I don't necessarily feel any regret over purchasing the book twice in different formats.  I've done the same thing for previous Stephen King works (like purchasing the hardcover editions of the first four Dark Tower novels, getting the Pocket Books editions of Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, and Pet Sematary for the new introductions, the illustrated edition of Salem's Lot, both the individual serialised Green Mile and the hardcover collection, the new edition of Danse Macabre, and the pop-up version of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon), so I guess it kind of comes down to a collector mentality.

Anyway, with regard to the content, "Blockade Billy" was a good read.  It's not particularly deep, and there's nothing all too shocking, but it's an entertaining story, well told.  I like the backdrop of old school baseball and King does a good job of fleshing it out.  "Morality", on the other hand, isn't bad, although I think I could have waited for it to be collected at a later date with more stories.  It hinges on the main character doing a morally reprehensible act for someone else, but when it comes down to it, the act could have been so much worse.  Maybe it just shows you where my morals happen to be, but it didn't seem to be the thing that would cause the overall moral decay of the character to the extremes presented.

Personally, I think a variation of the idea -- basically living a "good" life but doing a "bad" act in order to choose between the two; leading to the argument between Aristotelian and Modern ethics -- was done much better in Brian Bolland's contribution to Batman: Black & White.