Happened in the summer of '77, when his idiot savant younger brother built a vast cardboard fort with secret doors leading into other worlds. John is locked in a basement stained with the blood of half a dozen murdered children, and an antique telephone, long since disconnected, rings at night with calls from the dead. and dead, waiting in the Rosebud Theater one afternoon in 1945.įrancis was human once, but now he's an eight-foot-tall locust, and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. There are no stinkers here that shouldn’t have been included, but you will certainly find yourself remembering some morsels more fondly than others.Joe Hill's award-winning story collection, featuring 'The Black Phone,' soon to be a major motion picture from Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions This will largely be a case of personal preference. Of course, as with any collection of short stories, or sketch shows, or bag of Revels, there are some that will hit the spot and some that won’t. As fantasy and horror writer Christopher Golden rightly says in his introduction to the book, “It happens so rarely for a writer to pop up fully formed like this.” It isn’t necessary for a reader to be aware of Hill’s lineage to know that he is someone who understands and loves a good story, regardless of which genre it ‘belongs’ to.

It’s this confidence in both his readership and his own ability that sets Joe Hill apart from many début authors, and makes it easy to see why the publisher give a chance to some kid with only a handful of short stories under his belt and not even a famous surname. The first collection from 1 New York Times bestselling author Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts is an inventive and chilling compendium that established this award-winning, critically acclaimed author as a major player in 21st-century fantastic fiction ( Washington Post ). Like Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in Scream, who knows she shouldn’t go back inside the house but can’t see a better way to escape her situation, the choices that the central character makes build tension in a way that relies on the reader to provide many of their own scares. In some ways it is a classic horror story which depends on the reader’s knowledge of the genre’s tropes in order for it to be fully appreciated. On the other hand, the story that opens the book, Best New Horror, is a different kind of beast. A more detailed description of a short story would provide a disservice to the reader, but it is a sweet and wistful yarn about nostalgia, loss, and the movies. The (nearly) title story, 20th Century Ghost, is the tale of a young boy who, on a visit to his local cinema, sees a ghost.

In genre terms, the stories here are a mixed bunch, ranging from adrenaline-pumping horror to character-driven drama.

20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill