In fact, otherness is the closest thing to a universal theme for the book - otherness and its attendant ills: bullying, isolation, loneliness, detachment from reality, and, in some cases, violence.I agree with Christopher Golden, who wrote the forward, that "Pop Art" is a truly exceptional work.I wish that horror-haters would read this book, as I think it represents what the genre can be at its best. I loved the often-sweet characters, who are all "other" in some way. It's safe to say that JH's inner child is alive and well. Many of the stories are told from a child's point of view. There's never a lecture, unwieldy dialog, or clunky narrative (an occupational hazard, I'm afraid, of the horror writer who envisions a separate reality only to falter when trying to describe it). Unifying elements: JH's control of the story is a combination of a beautifully light touch and an unflinching attention to whatever represents the horror in the work. It's not my place to say which JH does best I suspect that would come down to a reader's preference. There is something to be gained from reading a wide swath of an author's work in the form, IMHO.In JH's case, it's an appreciation of his astonishing range on the one hand and the consistency of the unifying elements on the other.Range: the book includes gross-out horror (no judgment intended, I just mean traditional gore), light-to-medium supernatural, and pure literary, as well as a couple of standards - the serial killer victim in the basement and the boys-at-play-discovering-something-awful-in-the-woods.
Read moreĪside from multi-author anthologies, not too many short story collections are being pubbed these days, especially in genre.
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). Nolan knows but can never tell what really 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. Joe Hill’s award-winning story collection, featuring “The Black Phone,” soon to be a major motion picture from Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions
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