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A Face in the Crowd
A Face in the Crowd
A Face in the Crowd
Ebook83 pages1 hour

A Face in the Crowd

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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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 this baseball tale with a twist from master storyteller Stephen King.

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….
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateAug 21, 2012
ISBN9781476713342
Author

Stephen King

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker, Holly, Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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Reviews for A Face in the Crowd

Rating: 3.493670806329114 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

158 ratings15 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dean Evers führt ein einsames und zurückgezogenes Leben. Nach dem Tod seiner Frau hat er kaum noch Kontakt zur Außenwelt. Was ihm bleibt ist der Alkohol und der Baseball.Eines Tages winkt ihm aus dem Fernseher sein ehemaliger Zahnarzt zu. Doch dieser müsste schon seit langer Zeit tot sein. Als am nächsten Abend sein Geschäftspartner seinen Gruß aus der Röhre direkt in Evers Wohnzimmer sendet, wird Dean immer unwohler: denn er war Gast auf dessen Beerdigung.Und noch mehr Menschen erscheinen. Menschen, die Dean in seinem Leben nicht ausstehen konnte und denen er das Leben zur Hölle gemacht hat. Solange, bis Evers endlich begreift.Als eBook konzipiert, hat dieses „Buch“ in seiner gedruckten Form einen Umfang von lediglich 59 Seiten.Eine Kurzgeschichte.Über einen Mann am Ende seines Lebens angekommen, von allen gemieden, einsam und verlassen. Er flüchtet sich in eine Welt aus Erinnerungen, versucht mit seinem Leben klar zu kommen und kann es doch nicht.Doch die Geister der Vergangenheit lassen einen niemals los. Das muss Evers am eigenen Leib erfahren.Eine Geschichte mit viel Moral.Für ein Hardcover Buch mit weniger als 70 Seiten einen Preis von 8 Euro zu bezahlen, ist ziemlich heftig. Der Name des Autors rechtfertigt noch lange nicht den Preis.Auch für hartgesottene Fans eine bittere Pille.Wie bereits erwähnt war diese Geschichte ein eBook, das durch die großen Namen eine Art Zugpferd darstellen sollte.Der Inhalt an sich ist in Ordnung, durchaus einer Kurzgeschichte würdig, aber hätte ebenso gut einen Platz in einer Novellensammlung gefunden.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Dean Evers is a lonely man since his wife died. He spends a lot of time watching the Rays play ball. When he begins seeing friends sitting in the stands behind home plate he doesn't get excited like most people would-he gets scared. That's because the old friends are dead. Each game is a new old face. Only Stephen King can turn a baseball game into a scary story. A quick and easy read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Dean Evers sees all his old friends and enemies at the baseball game as he watches on his big screen TV. Not unusual you say? Well it wouldn't be if they weren't all dead. The story is short, it's succinct and to the point. Dean leaves New England and his beloved Red Sox and moves to Florida, the land of the Devil Rays. The story takes place over just a couple of days but embraces the entire lifetime of Dean Evers as he watches baseball on TV and is haunted by Faces in the Crowd, faces of those he has wounded or who have injured him, faces that logic says just couldn't be there. Stephen King fans will love it, as it was definitely a creepy Stephen King ending.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Clever. Enjoyable, even if you're not a baseball fan. Not his best work, but ultimately readable and fun.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Face in the Crowd was written by Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan. Dean Evers is a widower who sits alone and watches baseball, then notices familiar faces in the crowd. Faces of people who should be dead.A great collaboration that was quick and fun to read. What can I say? It's Stephen King!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The feel of a cautionary tale. Live a good life, be kind to others, and don't screw people over. It will come back and bite you. Possibly in a creepy King manner.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A new collaboration from Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan who worked together chronicling the Red Sox improbable 2004 season in Faithful.Where Faithful was non-fiction, this new novella, A Face In the Crowd, is definitely pure fiction.Ever since the death of his wife, Dean Evers spends a lot of time watching Tampa Bay baseball on TV and lately he's been seeing a number of familiar faces behind home-plate. Problem is, the faces are of people who should be dead.A quick read and an enjoyable story. Kind of like watching an old episode of the original Twilight Zone TV series.A Face In the Crowd is available as both an audio-book and an e-book from most of the major retailers. A must read for the Constant Reader as King refers to his fans. Even if you're not among the King faithful, there's a pretty good chance you'll enjoy this one.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Only read the first short story, having been familiar with the other two books for a while. It was nice and melancholic, very well written.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was a bit disappointed with this story. I was hoping to settle down into a regular King novel, but was left hanging as this is nothing more than a short story. Though I felt there was a bit of the Stephen King freakishness about it, the story just didn't grab me as most of them do. Needless to say, I was a bit put out that it had ended so abruptly, and I was left wanting more.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Book 59. Quick and short story from King, while it is very effective in this format, can't help but feel that there is an opportunity to take the story onto a boarder novel version. Certainly is an interesting concept to explore further and deeper.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    What a strange short story by Stephen King. It wasn't long, and in my Ebook is ended at 57%. The rest of the Ebook was padded with previews of Black House, and Talisman, by Peter Straub and King.
    A solid, albeit very short story. 3 stars.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Pretty good read, I really enjoyed this. The first story is my favorite of the two but i really thought they was both really well done.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A very short, short story for the Kindle about baseball and death. Well-written, but I feel like I've read it before. I detect King's style all over it, but can't find O'nan, except maybe for the baseball references.Also, the story is only 50% of the content and the rest is a "preview" of Stephen King and Peter Straub's Black House -- kind of a weird thing to preview, as it was published in 2001.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Maybe it's because I don't understand baseball (I'm Italian after all) but this book doesn't impress me much. The story itself is a nice one, but all this baseball stuff... no, better read something else from King

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I liked this story, and thought it was pretty creepy. Seeing dead friends and family members behind the plate during a televised baseball game is freaky enough for me! But the story ends super abruptly, almost as if by accident. I was shocked that I had reached the end! As for the purchase of this story on Kindle, I want to warn y'all that this story is short and only takes up about 57% of the purchase! The rest is excerpt from 'The Talisman' and 'Black House', which I for one already own. What a gip! But the story? Short, but good!

    1 person found this helpful

Book preview

A Face in the Crowd - Stephen King

Cover: A Face in the Crowd, by Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan

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A Face in the Crowd

Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan

A Face in the Crowd, by Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan, Scribner

Scribner

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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 colored the West, he found himself turning on the Rays game to fill his empty condo.

He knew it was just a way of passing time. He and Ellie had been married forty-six years, through the good and the bad, and now he had no one who remembered any of it. She was the one who’d lobbied him to move to St. Pete, and then, not five years after they packed up the house, she had her stroke. The terrible thing was that she was in great shape. They’d just played a bracing set of tennis at the club. She’d beat him again, meaning he bought the drinks. They were sitting under an umbrella, sipping chilled gin-and-tonics, when she winced and pressed a hand over one eye.

Brain freeze? he asked.

She didn’t move, sat there stuck, her other eye fixed, staring far beyond him.

El, he said, reaching to touch her bare shoulder. Later, though the doctor said it was impossible, he would remember her skin being cold.

She folded face first onto the table, scattering their glasses, bringing the waiters and the manager and the lifeguard from the pool, who gently laid her head on a folded towel and knelt beside her, monitoring her pulse until the EMTs arrived. She lost everything on her right side, but she was alive, that was what mattered, except, quickly, not a month after she finished her PT and came home from the rehab, she had a second, fatal stroke while he was giving her a shower, a scene which replayed in his mind so often that he decided he had to move to a new place, which brought him here, to a bayside high-rise where he knew no one, and anything that helped pass the time was welcome.

He ate while he watched the game. He made his own dinner now, having tired of eating alone in restaurants and ordering expensive takeout. He was still learning the basics. He could make pasta and grill a steak, cut up a red pepper to crown a bag salad. He had no finesse, and too often was discouraged at the results, taking little pleasure in them. Tonight was a pre seasoned pork chop he’d picked up at the Publix. Just stick it in a hot pan and go, except he could never tell when meat was done. He got the chop crackling, threw a salad together, and set a place at the coffee table, facing the TV. The fat at the bottom of the pan was beginning to char. He poked the meat with a finger, testing for squishiness, but couldn’t be sure. He took a knife and cut into it, revealing a pocket of blood. The pan was going to be hell to clean.

And then, when he finally sat down and took his first bite, the chop was tough. Terrible, he heckled himself. Chef Ramsay you ain’t.

The Rays were playing the Mariners, meaning the stands were empty. When the Sox or Yanks were in town, the Trop was packed, otherwise the place was deserted. In the bad old days it made sense, but now the club was a serious contender. As David Price breezed through the lineup, Evers noted with dismay several fans in the padded captain’s chairs behind the plate talking on their cell phones. Inevitably, one teenager began waving like a castaway, presumably to the person on the other end, watching at home.

Look at me, Evers said. I’m on TV, therefore I exist.

The kid waved for several pitches. He was right over the umpire’s shoulder, and when Price dropped in a backdoor curve, the replay zoomed on the Met Life strike zone, magnifying the kid’s idiotic grin as he waved in slow motion. Two rows behind him, sitting alone in his white sanitary smock with his thin, pomaded hair slicked back, solid and stoic as a tiki god, was Evers’s old dentist from Shrewsbury, Dr. Young.

Young Dr. Young, his mother had called him, because even when Evers was a child, he’d been old. He’d been a Marine in the Pacific, had come back from Tarawa missing part of a leg and all of his hope. He’d spent the rest of his life exacting his revenge not on the Japanese but on the children of Shrewsbury, finding soft spots in their enamel with the pitiless point of his stainless steel hook and plunging needles into their gums.

Evers stopped chewing and leaned forward to be sure. The greased-back hair and Mount Rushmore forehead, the Coke-bottle bifocals and thin lips that went white when he bore down with the drill—yes, it was him, and not a day older than when Evers had last seen him, over fifty years ago.

It couldn’t be. He’d be at least ninety. But the humidor that was Florida was full of men

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