https://speculiction.blogspot.com/2024/01/review-of-brittle-innings-by-michael.h... ( )

The perfect combination of Gothic novel, Baseball novel and Story of the American South. ( )

Great read, very atmospheric. You don't see many gothic baseball stories, and speculative fiction is poorer for it. ( )

For all that I'm not overly fond of actually watching baseball, I like reading fictional stories about it an awful lot. I've read (and liked) Field of Dreams, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Screwball, The Last Days of Summer, and many more. The mythology of baseball seems to lend itself to stories that aren't exactly grounded in our reality.

But the king of that sort of basball book has got to be Brittle Innings. One the one hand, it's a gritty, detailed portrait of life in the southern baseball leagues. You get to see it all, from practices to road trips to actual games, in understated prose that captures the feel of an era.

On the other hand, there's that myth thing, and in this case, it's a whopper, centered in the character of Henry "Jumbo" Clerval. I won't spoil the revelation, but the amazing thing is that Bishop manages to make Clerval as grounded and real as all of his teammates. ( )

Having recently read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I decided to make this my first Michael Bishop book and... what a cool mashup it turned out to be!

Brittle Innings comes across as though Mary Shelley and Ray Bradbury got together to write Frankenstein meets Huck Finn on a baseball farm team. Macabre, twisted, and brutal at times, in the hands of a lesser author, this could easily have been a complete mess but Bishop works a wonder with this tale. He is one heck of a writer. His ability to 'voice' the different characters is uncanny and the dialogue is perfectly pitched for the time-period of the story.

Four solid stars. ( )