GENERAL INFORMATION
TITLE: A FACE IN THE CROWD
AUTHOR: STEPHEN KING & STEWART O’NAN
PAGES: 80
PUBLISHER: HODDER
YEAR: 2012
GENRE: HORROR FICTION
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Face_in_the_Crowd_(novella)
I bought this e-book from www.kobo.com.
BLURB FROM THE COVER
The writing team that delivered the bestselling Faithful, about the 2004 Red Sox championship season, takes readers to the ballpark again, and to a world beyond, in an eBook original to be published on August 21, 2012.
Dean Evers, an elderly widower, sits in front of the television with nothing better to do than waste his leftover evenings watching baseball. It’s Rays/Mariners, and David Price is breezing through the line-up. Suddenly, in a seat a few rows up beyond the batter, Evers sees the face of someone from decades past, someone who shouldn’t be at the ballgame, shouldn’t be on the planet. And so begins a parade of people from Evers’s past, all of them occupying that seat behind home plate. Until one day Dean Evers sees someone even eerier….
EXTRACT
The summer after his wife died, Dean Evers started watching a lot of baseball. Like so many snowbirds from New England, he was a Red Sox fan who’d fled the nor’easters for the Gulf Coast of Florida and magnanimously adopted the Devil Rays, then perennial punching bags, as his second team. While he’d coached Little League, he’d never been a big fan, never obsessed, the way his son Pat was – but, night after night, as the gaudy sunset coloured the West, he found himself turning on the Rays game to fill his empty condo.
REVIEW
I enjoyed A Face In The Crowd. It was a pretty decent Stephen King yarn. It would fit nicely in between the pages of a collection of stories. I’ve never heard of Stewart O’Nan before. I find myself curious about how the collaboration came about. Who wrote what bit? I have too many thoughts in my head.
I thought the concept was very original for A Face In The Crowd. Imagine if you spotted someone from your past, who died, in a crowd somewhere? The very idea of it gives me chills. I liked the way King and O’Nan introduce the backstory of Dean and the various people he sees in the crowd. These scenes were little mini little stories-within-a-story.
A Face In The Crowd is well-written and engaging. King and O’Nan held my interest all the way through. I read A Face In The Crowd in one sitting. There are plenty of details and events in A Face In The Crowd to hold your interest and keep the pages turning.
A Face In The Crowd raises a lot of questions. The novella is very short and I felt there were a lot of questions unanswered at the end. A Face In The Crowd felt a little unfinished and not as polished as I would have expected. I would have like this to be a lot longer.
RATING
