Review by New York Times Review
Reading horror stories pretty inevitably involves the mental operation Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief," and Lord knows it can be a challenge, even for genre-hardened veterans. The hero of "Best New Horror," the opening story in Joe Hill's inventive collection, 20TH CENTURY GHOSTS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $24.95), is a professional anthologist who has read, by his own count, "almost 10,000 stories of horror and the supernatural" in the course of compiling 16 annual volumes of "America's Best New Horror," and his willing-suspension-of-disbelief fatigue has become so acute that he can no longer finish most of the stories that land on his desk. His ennui is almost French in its intensity: "He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul." I think we've all been there. One day, though, this jaded editor comes across a grisly little item by an unknown writer and finds himself, for the first time in a long while, disbelief-suspending with something like his old, unforced willingness. This story, "Buttonboy," has, he thinks, "the bread of everyday life" in it, rather than just the usual "rare bleeding meat"; he becomes so dangerously overexcited that he attempts to track down the author. What's remarkable about "Best New Horror" isn't that the story is savagely critical of the genre to which it belongs (though Hill's indictment of conventional horror is nervy stuff for a young writer), nor even that it's very, very scary, but rather that the narrative unfolds in a way that is consciously, and brazenly, predictable. The reader will not, in fact, be terribly surprised to learn that the editor's visit to the home of the mysterious writer proves to be a grievous error. The beauty of the tale is that the horror-weary editor isn't surprised either, and even takes a peculiar sort of satisfaction in the fulfillment of his direst expectations. "He knew better than anyone how these stories went," Hill writes, and in that sentence confers on his hero the dignity of a man coming to terms with something not merely predictable but inevitable - a man meeting his destiny stoically, even kind of nobly. Sure, it's a cheesy, pulp destiny, but it's as uniquely and irreducibly his as the fates of Borges's doomed knife-fighters and self-entrapped detectives are theirs. This is a horror fan's apotheosis. There are other fine stories in "20th Century Ghosts." "Pop Art," "You Will Hear the Locust Sing" and "Voluntary Committal" are all terrific, and the rest are, at a minimum, solid, swift and craftsmanlike. But "Best New Horror" seems to me the most thrillingly original of Hill's weird tales, a daredevil performance that keeps some complex ideas suspended in the air along with, of course, our usual disbelief. It's brave and astute of Hill to acknowledge that some part of the appeal of horror fiction - of any genre fiction, really - is its very predictability: the comfort of knowing, at least, what kind of story we're reading. This sad truth speaks directly to the vexed question of belief and disbelief because it suggests that for hard-core genre devotees the will to believe is perhaps a touch stronger than it ought to be - that the natural audience for horror consists of readers who are (with apologies to Fats Domino) ready, willing and able to suspend disbelief all night. What happens to that poor editor in "Best New Horror" is instructive: although he thinks that childish credulity has been burned out of him by those thousands of read and half-read stories, he discovers, to his sorrow (and sneaking pleasure), that it's still there, lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to sucker him one last time. Joe Hill has clearly given a fair amount of hard thought to the problematics of horror. It's his destiny, I suppose. He is, as he revealed shortly before the publication of his rambunctiously entertaining first novel, "Heart-Shaped Box," the son of Stephen and Tabitha King. "20th Century Ghosts" was originally published a couple of years ago in England, before the writer had outed himself as genre royalty, and you can sense in it the urgency of his desire to figure out how horror works, why so much of it is so bad and why, despite everything, it continues to matter to him. THESE are questions worth pondering, whether you're trying to write horror intelligently or simply reading a lot more of the stuff than is good for you. Before I came upon Hill's work, I'd been feeling discouraged about the current state of the genre, reading (and often abandoning) story after story that failed to persuade, failed to frighten, failed to stimulate whatever don't-go-there sensation it is we're looking for when we suspend disbelief, abandon hope and plunge into the dark forest of horror. I turned optimistically to the imago sequence (Night Shade, $24.95), the debut collection of the genre's other hot Kid, Laird Barron, and found within (there's no kind way of putting this) nothing but Lovecraft pastiches: stories of the kind that froze the soul of Joe Hill's hapless anthologist. Barron's a more ingenious Lovecraftian than most. He doesn't merely recycle the master's elaborate, harebrained "mythos" but adds (usually) his own strange spin to tales of ancient evil bubbling up in the modern world. He sometimes appears to have a hilariously literal take on Lovecraft's concept of the Old Ones, which customarily refers to a monstrous prehuman race whose survivors live underground in Godforsaken places like Antarctica and New England. In Barron's stories, these eons-old evildoers tend to manifest themselves in the form of sinister and irritable senior citizens. The problem with all these neo-Lovecraft jobs, though, is that even when they're as impressively peculiar as Laird Barron's, they feel secondhand, pointless, helplessly de trop. The mythology Lovecraft cooked up was, God help him, personal and passionate; it carries a whiff of madness. Lacking that authentic, unfakable, belief-compelling insanity, stories like those in "The Imago Sequence" can't achieve anything much better than nuttiness. And that's not scary. Reading Barron, though, I realized that part of the reason his stories leave me cold is that they assume, as too much genre fiction does, a highish level of reader credulity, and I resent it. What kind of reader do you think I am? I'm not easy. There's a telling passage in MISTER B. GONE (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.95), Clive Barker's execrable new novel - which is not about the death of George Balanchine but is the first-person narrative of a demon named Jakabok Botch, who surfaced from the underworld around the time Gutenberg was perfecting the printing press. "They want to believe," Barker/Botch writes. "No, strike that. They don't simply want to believe it. They need to." "They" are - genetically and apparently without exception - "people," and "it" is stories like this one, full of "venomous stuff." Although Barker has not in recent years come close to matching the brilliant shocks of the stories collected in his "Books of Blood" in the 1980s, many horror readers still approach his work with some degree of anticipation, a hope that he'll find his macabre touch again. But "Mister B. Gone" uses up the last small pocketful of that good will. The novel is thin, slovenly and grimly unwitty. You can't escape the melancholy feeling that this is what happens to writers who take our belief for granted. Joe Hill, refreshingly, does not And neither does the veteran John Shirley, whose latest book, LIVING SHADOWS (Prime, paper, $14.95), is subtitled "Stories: New and Preowned" because much of it has been previously published: some stories in earlier, out-of-print Shirley collections, others in small-press anthologies and obscure magazines. It's a greatest-hits album spanning a few decades of astonishingly consistent and rigorously horrifying work. In his foreword, Shirley insists that he doesn't write genre fiction, and although he's genuinely tough to categorize, all his stories - both the nonsupernatural ones that make up the first half of "Living Shadows" and the more fantastic tales in the second half - give off the chill of top-grade horror. It's a moral chill, because Shirley's great subject is the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering. The opening line of his novel "Demons" states the theme succinctly: "It's amazing what you can get used to." In "The Sewing Room," one of the new stories in the present collection, an ordinary woman discovers, to her horror, that her husband is a serial murderer, and we discover, to ours, that she can live with it. Shirley's dramatis personae tend to be fairly unpleasant folks: killers, petty criminals, drug dealers, end-of-the-line substance abusers, Hollywood sleazeballs. (He writes screenplays as well as fiction.) And while the matter of his stories is often shocking, his manner is calm, restrained. The prose is attitude-free and precise, its characteristic sound a minor chord of sorrow and banked anger. He writes about sensation unsensationally, with a particular tenderness toward those who manage, against the odds and by whatever means, to feel something. Maybe the best story in this superb collection is a rapt little piece called "Skeeter Junkie," in which a young heroin addict first begins to enjoy the feeling of the mosquito feeding on his arm, then starts to identify with it and then, as the drugs ooze through his veins, somehow becomes it and finally uses the "exquisite" flying bloodsucker to transport him to the apartment of his comely but standoffish downstairs neighbor. It's a horror story, I guess, but it's also funny, weirdly erotic and, in a way that horror almost never is, tragic. In the title of Shirley's collection, there's a faint, happy echo of the passage from "Biographia Literaria" in which Coleridge coined his famous phrase. Speaking of his contributions to the seminal 1798 volume "Lyrical Ballads," which included "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the poet wrote: "My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." That's exactly what good horror writers like Joe Hill and John Shirley do with the shadows of their imagination. And there's an explanation here, too, of the hope that can keep even the most skeptical, fed-up reader coming back to horror fiction. Watching vampires having sex may not strike you as an adequate reward for suspending disbelief. But the poetry of fear and mortality is worth all the belief you can muster.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Fully developed characters with complex emotional lives enhance the 14 stories in Joe Hill's extraordinary collection, 20th Century Ghosts. There's not a false note or disappointing effort in this volume from the author of the bestselling novel Heart-Shaped Box. Hill's is one of the most confident and assured new voices in horror and dark fantasy in recent years. (Morrow, $24.95 320p ISBN 9780-06-114797-5) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
When Hill's first novel (Heart-Shaped Box) was published, there was much buzz when it was revealed that he was the son of Stephen King. Before that was widely known, however, Hill published a collection of short stories in Britain, which won the Bram Stoker Award, and his novella Best New Horror beat out his father's "The Things They Left Behind" in the Long Fiction category. Ghosts, which had a limited print run in Britain, is finally being released here, and it is astounding. Though most of the stories have elements of horror, the overall mood of the collection is one of heartbreaking wonderment, especially evident in the beautiful story "Pop Art" about a young delinquent's friendship with an inflatable boy. Other standouts are "In the Rundown," a Raymond Carveresque tale about a loser who peaked in high school; "Better Than Home," about a disabled boy's relationship with his father; and "Voluntary Committal," in which a child's cardboard fort becomes a solution to his big brother's problems. This edition includes the new story "Scheherezade's Typewriter" hidden in the acknowledgments. Highly recommended for short story and horror fiction collections.-Karl G. Siewert, MLIS, Tulsa City-Cty. Lib., OK (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-This collection of short stories will appeal not only to fantasy and horror fans, but also to those who appreciate drama and suspense. The book was originally published in the United Kingdom in 2005; the U.S. edition contains 14 short stories, two of which are new to it, and a novella. Selections vary from "My Father's Mask," a bone-chilling tale of a family on the run, to "The Widow's Breakfast" and the kindness of a stranger. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of this anthology is the author's ability to engage readers by eliciting a broad spectrum of emotions, in many cases all within the same story. Teens will find themselves disturbed, amused, and touched by the various conclusions to these tales. And while the plots and characters vary greatly, each story challenges readers to use their own imaginations while appreciating the tales' twists and turns. With their cliff-hanger endings, quick pacing, and three-dimensional characters, many of these selections will spark interesting classroom and book-club discussions. Recommend this title to teens looking for a book that will both challenge and entertain.-Lynn Rashid, Marriots Ridge High School, Marriotsville, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A collection of pleasantly creepy stories follows Hill's debut novel (Heart Shaped Box, 2007). Published in a number of magazines from 2001 to the present, most of the stories display the unself-conscious dash that made Hill's novel an intelligent pleasure. In addition to the touches of the supernatural, some heavy, some light, the stories are largely united by Hill's mastery of teenaged-male guilt and anxiety, unrelieved by garage-band success or ambition. One of the longest and best, "Voluntary Committal," is about Nolan, a guilty, anxious high-school student, Morris, his possibly autistic or perhaps just congenitally strange little brother, and Eddie, Nolan's wild but charming friend. Morris, whose problems dominate but don't completely derail his family's life, spends the bulk of his time in the basement creating intricate worlds out of boxes. Eddie and Nolan spend their time in accepted slacker activities until Eddie, whose home life is rough, starts pushing the edges, leading to real mischief, a big problem for Nolan who would rather stay within the law. It's Morris who removes the problem for the big brother he loves, guaranteeing perpetual guilt and anxiety for Nolan. "My Father's Mask" is a surprisingly romantic piece about a small, clever family whose weekend in an inherited country place involves masks, time travel and betrayal. The story least reliant on the supernatural may leave the most readers pining for a full-length treatment: "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead" reunites a funny but failed standup comedian with his equally funny ex-high school sweetheart Harriet, now married and a mother. Bobby has come back to Pittsburgh, tail between his legs, substitute teaching and picking up the odd acting job, and it is on one of those gigs, a low-budget horror film, that the couple reconnects, falling into their old comedic rhythms. Not just for ghost addicts. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
