Strange weather Four short novels

Joe Hill

eAudio - 2017

"Snapshot" is the disturbing story of a Silicon Valley adolescent who finds himself threatened by "The Phoenician," a tattooed thug who possesses a Polaroid Instant Camera that erases memories, snap by snap. A young man takes to the skies to experience his first parachute jump . . . and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero's island of roiling vapor that seems animated by a mind of its own in "Aloft." On a seemingly ordinary day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open up in a downpour of nails-splinters of bright crystal that shred the skin of anyone not safely under cover. "Rain" explores this escalating apocalyptic event, as the deluge of nails spreads out across the countr...y and around the world. In "Loaded," a mall security guard in a coastal Florida town courageously stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun rights movement. But under the glare of the spotlights, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it. When an out-of-control summer blaze approaches the town, he will reach for the gun again and embark on one last day of reckoning.

Saved in:
Subjects
Genres
Horror fiction
Published
[United States] : HarperAudio 2017.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Main Author
Joe Hill (author)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Other Authors
Kate Mulgrew, 1955- (narrator), Wil Wheaton (-), Stephen Lang, 1952-, Dennis Boutsikaris
Edition
Unabridged
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
Cover image
Physical Description
1 online resource (1 audio file (14hr., 36 min.)) : digital
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
ISBN
9780062694447
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Hill is back with a collection of four short novels that each showcases his talent for mining modern lives for fear. As he notes in the collection's afterword, tales of horror and fantasy thrive at a shorter length, and readers will be vigorously nodding their heads in agreement. These novellas present a foreboding and unsettling view of our world and contain complex and complicated casts of diverse characters. In Snapshot, a grown man looks back on a summer gone by when he found a Polaroid that steals rather than preserves memories; in Loaded, Hill writes his impassioned, heartbreaking, and compulsively readable response to the Sandy Hook tragedy. Aloft is a sinister fairy tale about a macabre world hiding on top of a cloud; and in the final novella, Rain, set in the present time, the apocalypse comes as showers of shiny crystal nails pelt the Earth. These tales are terrifying and compelling, filled with intense anxiety throughout, but it is that final story, set entirely in the real world, that is the most menacing of the bunch. After getting two 700-plus-page novels in a row, fans will be thrilled to take in Hill's malevolent mind through these masterfully crafted single-sitting reads reminiscent of the very best of the short works by giants of the form like King, Gaiman, and Miéville. Hill is not only maturing as a writer of relevantly chilling tales but he is also emerging as a distinct voice for our complicated times.--Spratford, Becky Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hill's follow up to 2016's The Fireman is a quartet of suspenseful novellas, narrated in this production by four familiar, well-chosen actors. Actor Wil Wheaton portrays, in "Snapshot," a nerdy yet heroic Silicon Valley teen who tries to save an elderly neighbor from a sinister bully whose Polaroid Instant Camera erases memories. "Aloft" casts actor Dennis Boutsikaris as a reluctant novice skydiver who, trying to impress a young woman, falls into a cloud so solid it floats him away, then begins breaking apart. In "Rain," actor Kate Mulgrew portrays an assortment of Coloradans trying to cope with storms that send crystal shards to Earth; the story's protagonist is a woman trying to stay alive while traveling from Boulder to Denver to care for her late girlfriend's family. In "Loaded," Stephen Lang turns in two excellent performances: a roaring portrayal of an embittered small-town Florida mall cop as he transforms into a homicidal maniac, and a nuanced, subdued portrayal of the cop's bête noire, a soft-spoken, maternal newswoman. The stories are intriguing on their own, but the readers raise them to a higher level of entertainment. A Morrow hardcover. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Horror does not need to reside in the shadows: it can be as natural as the weather, as these four short works reveal. In "Snapshot," Cupertino, CA, teen Mike crosses paths with a man who is stealing memories with a Polaroid camera, photo by photo. In Colorado, a young woman's life is irrevocably changed when gold and silver needles fall from the sky in the apocalyptic "Rain." "Aloft" sends a beginner skydiver on a cloud-borne journey. And the final story, "Loaded," revolves around a Florida mall security guard who stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero-until an approaching summer blaze forces the truth to break out and the guard to break down. Hill's tightly written prose keeps each novella moving quickly, but the author still incorporates enough details for readers to get inside his characters' minds and to respond viscerally to the events depicted. VERDICT This will be an essential instant read for Hill's (NOS4A2) fans and a solid introduction for new -readers.-KC © Copyright 2017. 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

Horrormeister Hill (The Fireman, 2016) offers a four-pack of mayhem in this sparkling collection of short novels.Think climate change is bad now? Just wait until those obsidian-sharp blades of rain cut you to pieces come the next storm. Hill, son of Stephen King, has his father's eye for those climacteric moments when the ordinary turns into the extraordinaryand the sinister to boot. In Rain, a warm Colorado day turns nasty when silver and gold needles begin to pour down. Hill's narrator, ever the helpful neighbor, watches as they rip a woman to shreds: "Her crinkly silver gown was jerked this way and that on her body, as if invisible dogs were fighting over it." Memorable but icky, that. In such circumstances, you can bet that the ordinary norms don't hold; give humans an emergency dire enough, and civil society collapses, presto! So it is in Loaded when a Florida shopping mall becomes the playground of a shooter unusual in more ways than one; what gives the story, which is altogether too probable, creepy luster is the dancing cyclonic firestorm that's heading toward the mall, which may have been what prompted the security-guard protagonist of the tale to add to the death count without the intercession of any apparent conscience. Hill squeezes in some nice pop-culture references along the way, including one to a namesake: "Finally the kid who looked like Jonah Hill had entered the shop, and the shooter, with her dying breath, had put a bullet in his fat, foolish face." Icky againas it should be for a horror honcho. In homage to "The Illustrated Man," perhaps, in Snapshot Hill imagines an ancient mariner sort of psychopath whose Phoenician-script tats invite onlookers to run away but instead lure them in, the easier for him to tinker with their memories, while Aloft is a pitch-perfect fable that blends Ted Chiang and Aristophanes into an eerie delight. Worth waiting in line for, if you're a Hill fan. If you're not, this is the book to turn you into one. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.