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Letter to the editor

'20th Century Ghosts' full of spirited stories

Tales from sweet to scary are sure to surprise. So is the author's identity.

By Colette Bancroft, Times books editor
Published October 28, 2007

20th Century Ghosts
By Joe Hill
William Morrow, 316 pages, $24.95
joehillfiction.com/

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Some of the ghosts are downright sweet. Some of the ghosts are savage. But just about every story in Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts offers what great ghost stories should: surprises.

Not every story here is strictly a ghost story; in fact, one of the most satisfying surprises in this collection is Hill's fluent, confident crossing of genre lines. There are horror stories, but you'll also find realism, surrealism, romance and even a grisly take on Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

The title story is a sweet one, in its own macabre way. It's a romance lit by the silver screen, but not in the usual fashion.

Moviegoers at the Rosebud Theater sometimes find themselves in conversation with Imogene Gilchrist, a pretty young woman who's an avid movie fan - so avid she can't stop talking about them, even when her nose begins to bleed, even when the person she's chatting with notices how cold her arm is.

Imogene, it seems, died right in the middle of The Wizard of Oz, and she just can't leave. Alec Sheldon met her when he was 15 and became so obsessed he later bought the theater. Now he's 73, the cineplex is putting him out of business, and he's not sure what will become of Imogene - or himself.

Pop Art is another sweetie, a whimsical tale about a kid whose best friend is a normal boy in every way - except that he's inflatable, vulnerable to air loss to any sharp object. Yes, his name is Art, and that title is a groaner pun.

But the story is amazingly convincing, and its exploration of the emotional struggles of kids who see themselves as outsiders ascends as Art does from whimsy to powerful metaphor.

Not all is sweetness here. Some of the stories are truly chilling, among them The Black Phone. It's a suffocatingly scary story about 13-year-old Finney, abducted by a serial killer of children and locked in a basement room. Starving, cold, all too aware what his likely fate will be, Finney gets a phone call - on an ancient, disconnected phone.

Both In the Rundown, about an angry teenager who stumbles upon a terrible crime, and The Cape, whose young narrator discovers he can fly, demonstrate Hill's knack for fleshing out characters so effectively we see them as a certain kind of person - then giving the character a twist that both shocks and seems entirely believable.

Best New Horror is a craftily layered tale about Eddie Carroll, a cynical magazine editor who tracks down the author of a particularly gruesome horror story called Buttonboy. Carroll expects Peter Kilrue to be a freak, but he has no idea.

The longest story is the novella Voluntary Committal, which focuses on a family torn by the mental illness of Morris, the youngest son. The story's narrator is his adolescent big brother, and he struggles between his desire to protect Morris and his wish to be seen as a normal kid, not the weird kid's brother.

It leads him to bad decisions, notably a friendship with a bully named Eddie Prior (somebody named Eddie must have done something bad to Hill once upon a time).

Eddie becomes fascinated with the enormous construction projects Morris occupies himself with in the family basement. But these tunnels and forts built out of cardboard boxes have some very strange things going on inside them. And Morris is not as out of it as Eddie thinks.

If these stories anchoring the supernatural in quotidian realism sound familiar, that may be because Hill picked up the technique at the master's knee - or maybe in his DNA.

His full name is Joseph Hillstrom King, and he's the middle child of Stephen King. His mother, Tabitha, and brother, Owen, are also novelists. (Stephen King dedicated his 1977 novel The Shining to "Joe Hill King, who shines on.")

Hill, determined to make it as a writer without dropping the biggest name in popular fiction, has been writing under a pseudonym for more than a decade, keeping the family connection under wraps (and collecting rejection letters).

20th Century Ghosts was first published in a limited edition in 2005, winning the Bram Stoker Award and a number of other prizes. In February, Hill published his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, another ghost story that quickly became a bestseller.

He also went public with his family ties. With the novel and 20th Century Ghosts, he makes his claim on the family business. We'll leave the parsing of his stories Abraham's Boys and My Father's Mask (both about sons who rather dramatically take their father's place) to the psychologically inclined, and just figure the old man must be proud.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

[Last modified October 24, 2007, 18:07:45]