A Face in the Crowd is a novella by Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan (2012) …  audiobook, read by Craig Wasson.

Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan had previously collaborated in 2004 on a non-fiction book Faithful, chronicling the 2004 Boston Red Sox season. In Faithful, during a discussion about watching baseball on television, King posits an idea for a story entitled “Spectators”, which later evolved into A Face in the Crowd:

… What if a guy watches a lot of baseball games on TV, maybe because he’s a shut-in or an invalid (or maybe because he’s doing a book on the subject, poor schmuck), and one night he sees his best friend from childhood, who was killed in a car crash, sitting in one of the seats behind the backstop? Yow!  …