by Ray Wallace

20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill
HarperCollins

For only having a single novel on the market along with a lone short story collection, Joe Hill has made quite a splash on the horror fiction scene. His work has garnered numerous awards including a couple of Stokers (one for Best First Novel) and a World Fantasy Award. After reading the Stoker winning novel entitled Heart-Shaped Box and now the short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, I have to say that the guy’s work definitely lives up to the hype. Especially the collection which was, to put it as succinctly as possible, a joy to read and goes on a short list of books that I honestly wish were longer.

The collection’s first story is "Best New Horror" and tells the tale of Eddie Carroll, editor of an annual anthology called America's Best New Horror. A man jaded by a bitter divorce and years of wading through mostly uninspired fiction in an attempt to find quality pieces for his publication, Eddie finds himself pleasantly surprised by a story called "Buttonboy: A Love Story" he is sent by an author named Peter Kilrue. The story is weird and disturbing and—most surprising of all—inspired and has a twist ending that Eddie actually likes. He has never heard of Peter Kilrue, however, and finds getting in touch with him rather difficult. And when he eventually does he realizes that sometimes the artist can personify all of the darker qualities instilled in his art. Up next is "20th Century Ghost," a nostalgic tale that centers around the ghost of a dead young woman haunting an old movie theater and the effect she has on the theater owner’s life. Then there is "Pop Art," a story about an intelligent and thoughtful plastic boy named Art who is filled with air. It deals with the many trials this peculiar boy is forced to overcome, and the special and unexpected bond he forms with a classmate, a normal human boy who is considered one of the tough kids at school who does what he can to protect Art. One of the definite "must reads" of this collection. As is the following story, "You Will Hear the Locust Sing." Here we have a play on Kafka’s "The Metamorphosis" as a high school kid awakens one day to discover that he has been transformed into a giant bug. From this moment on, his life and the town in which he lives will never be the same again.

Speaking of must reads . . . A few stories later we come to "The Black Phone." A boy is kidnapped by a man driving a van filled with balloons, knocked unconscious and brought to a room which is little more than a cell, the only furnishings a mattress on the floor and a phone on the wall. "A large, old-fashioned, black phone, the receiver hanging from a silver cradle on the side." A phone that hasn’t worked in a long time, the boy is informed by the man who has brought him there. The man who it seems is responsible for the disappearance of a number of other children. Children who were never heard from again. As time goes by, the boy despairs of ever leaving the room, of ever seeing his family again. That is, until the phone starts to ring . . . Some of the other standout stories here include "Last Breath" which is set in a museum filled with jars that hold "the largest collection of last breaths in the world" each containing "the final exhalations of some very famous people." "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead" is a touching and nostalgic piece that follows a guy down on his luck named—you guessed it—Bobby Conroy as he runs into an old flame while acting as a zombie extra on the set of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. And then there is the collection’s closing story, "Voluntary Committal." It is told from the perspective of a man named Nolan looking back to 1977 and the strange and tumultuous events that changed his life that year. These events include the terrible crime in which he was involved, the disappearance of a friend of his, and the building of a cardboard labyrinth in the basement of his parents’ home by his idiot savant brother, Morris, a labyrinth that seemed to lead those who entered it beyond the confines of the room in which it was contained.