My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable.
- Title: 20th Century Ghosts
- Author: Joe Hill
- Genre: Horror/Surreal/Literary
- Year: 2005
Either you know who Joe Hill’s father is, or you don’t. Once you do know, it’s hard to read his work without the comparison somewhere in the back of your mind . . . until of course you realize that Joe Hill is a writer with a voice and style all his own, and a damn fine one at that. So I won’t be talking about his dad in this review.
20th Century Ghosts is a collection of sixteen shorts loosely characterizable as horror, but with strong surreal, magical realist, and literary elements. But like the best fiction, these stories defy easy classification, they make that rare leap from being stories of a certain kind, to being stories of a certain mind. The stories in 20th Century Ghosts are best described as Joe Hill stories, and his distinctive voice comes through in each and every one.
The anthology opens with Best New Horror, a story that plays with genre tropes and cliches and the metafictional awareness of the elements of a horror story, and yet still manages to feel like what it’s deconstructing by the end. It’s a great preparation for what is to come, stories that are both self-aware yet unafraid to embrace the genre.
A surrealist thread is strong in Hill’s short fiction, and Pop Art, the first sentence of which is quoted above, is perhaps the best story in a collection of strong pieces. Pop Art concerns a boy and his best friend, Art, who is described as having a body like a pool toy — he is literally inflatable, and has to deal with the constant threat of punctures. Art doesn’t fit in, how could he?, but the abuse and resentment he suffers seems all to real. In the end, he proves too ephemeral, too lofty, for the world we live in. What Hill does well again and again is capture the feeling of the outcast, and many of his stories deal with children who do not fit in with their peers, and Pop Art is an amazing example of his ability to create genuine emotion from absurd or over-the-top situations. There is a great subtlety and sense of proportion at work in these stories, and a palpable care in their construction, and no matter how bizarre the situation (such as in the Kafkaesque You Will Hear the Locust Sing, which might be described as The Metamorphosis for a post-Columbine age), Hill evokes real feeling.
The relationship of fathers and sons is another Hill theme, my favorite example of which is Abraham’s Boys, about the two sons of Dracula’s Abraham Van Helsing growing up in turn of the century rural America. Van Helsing is an uncompromising patriarch, grim and ruthless, constantly on guard against the dangers of the night, and naturally such a father makes for strange sons. And like his biblical namesake, this Abraham is also ready to make sacrifices.
Hill loves to play with genre elements to create something new, and his work his full of references that will make a fellow fan smile. From Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead, a story about lost opportunities for love among zombie extras during the making of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead; to The Cape, which takes every boy’s dream of superheroic flight and filters it through a bitter young man’s sense of failure; to the excellent Voluntary Committal, which uses a Lovecraftian framework to tell a story about an unusual boy (call him an expert it non-euclidean geometry) and his brother — Hill celebrates the genre with originality and real affection.
There are a few more or less straight-forward supernatural or horror tales here as well, such as 20th Century Ghost, from which the collection derives its name. But whether Hill is dealing in ghosts, killers, misfits, or children, he is never a sensationalist, never one to take a cheap shot or hold the reader’s hand. There is real mastery in Hill’s short fiction, and a tremendous sense of possibility. While I’ve read and enjoyed his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, I think it is in his short fiction that Hill shows his true gifts as a writer and storyteller. I highly recommend this collection for anyone that enjoys a dark tale.
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