Brittle Innings begins like a baseball novel, gives heaps of nostalgia for fans of the sport and then deftly moves into becoming a sequel for one of the greatest horror novels ever written.
This is actually the second novel I've read by Michael Bishop, who's earlier work Who Made Stevie Crye? was an intriguing horror novel about a cursed typewriter. His 1994 novel, Brittle Innings (sorry for the 22-year-old spoiler) is actually a meld of two different stories, a monster hiding among humanity, and a nostalgic look at a man's career for a minor league baseball team in the 1940s. As someone who does not really care for sports, I found the baseball story, mixed with a coming of age narrative for it's protagonist, Danny Boles, to be pretty compelling, looking at the American deep south in the forties, and (for me) the world of professional baseball.
I felt that the monster story in the novel was incredibly well handled, and kept itself quite in keeping with the creatures origin. A neat gateway story for story-lovers who might not necessarily feel comfortable with horror.
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