20th Century Ghosts — Review by Chris

It's official: Joe Hill is a Reading Buddy Writer.

Both of his books — Heart-Shaped Box (which I reviewed in January 2008) and, now, 20th Century Ghosts — frightened me enough to want to have someone else in the room, especially when I was foolish enough to read them at night.

I can see why 20th Century Ghosts won a host of horror genre awards. It's freakin' scary — but not all stories are scaring us equally. I read the stories in order, and I read them occasionally. (Usually, I would read one, which would whet my appetite, then I'd scare myself with the next one and put the book down.) Hill is not looking to leap out from behind the door and scream, "Boo!" Instead, he employs a number of different methods by which we can be horrified.

The stories veer wildly from the bizarre to the creepy to the chilling to the outright frightening, then back to bizarre. A couple are pretty tame in comparison to ones that might surround it. Many are character studies in which the supernatural is a player, but the character is the main event. A couple are too subtle — until the reader gets to the "punchline," which is well worth the read. Some names are familiar, borrowed from other horror stories or other media in the horror genre.

I recommend reading them in the order the author arranged them. I liked them that way — it gave me a chance to catch my breath from time to time.

Hill starts out with a bang with "Best New Horror." An editor receives a story that is wholly original — and, frankly, terribly disturbing — and wants to publish the story in his magazine. He has to track down the author, and the stories he hears about this man are unsettling. However, horror stories are filled with people who just can't believe what they hear is anywhere near true. If they practiced an ounce of caution, there would be no story. The ending of Hill's story is as disturbing as the fiction within the fiction. (At least, we hope it's fiction.)

Then there's the title story, which involves a movie theater, a young girl in the audience and just a little death.

After that there's an inflatable boy, a boy-turned-atomic-insect, an autistic child who is loved and accepted by his father, an abducted youth who's not alone after all, a man who can fly, a boy in the wrong place at the wrong time, a doctor who collects something priceless from the dying — and the list goes on and horrifyingly on.

His lead characters are all male. It's a little surprising, and a little disappointing. I was floored by Hill's credible and thorough development of female characters in Heart-Shaped Box and looked forward to his female characters in the next book of his I read. However, this collection was published before his novel, so I won't complain. If anything, it intrigues me to see how he will continue his great character development.

If you like horror, you will like this book. I'm not very good at hunting down individual stories before they're collected and handed to me, but for Hill, I'd search the shelves (or, more realistically, set up a feed to alert me to all things Joe Hill).

I just wish that, whenever I saw the spine or covers of his books, I didn't start humming "The Ballad of Joe Hill" (which, in my head, sounds like Joan Baez's famous 1969 Woodstock performance). However, I also start to dance whenever I hear "Fergalicious," which is much more embarrassing than humming, so I guess I should count my blessings.

Heart-Shaped Box — Review by Chris

When I was a kid, I read as many scary books as I could get my hands on. I knew the word "poltergeist" before I knew how to pronounce it. I read about demons, haunted people and property, werewolves, Satan, black arts and magic, vampires, ghosts and unexplained phenomenon. I wore a cross for six months in junior high after reading Salem's Lot. I feared torrents of unexplained blood. So when I say I know scary, trust me: I know scary.

And Heart-Shaped Box is scary.

Jude Coyne, an aging rock star, has a penchant for the macabre. When he is offered a chance to purchase a ghost, he goes for it without a second thought. After all, most of his trophies are harmless (to him, at least): a snuff film, a hangman's noose, a cannibal's cookbook. His girlfriend is very young (at least half his age) and very Goth. He sings about death and Hell in his heavy metal songs.

One could suppose he's on a first-name basis with the Devil, based on his stage persona and his interest in the macabre and death. Only Jude is pretty much an ordinary guy with ordinary hang-ups and baggage: a divorce, alienation from his family, loss of his longtime friends to death and caution toward forging new relationships due to his fame and money.

Then comes the invitation: for a mere $1,000, Jude can purchase a suit that comes with the ghost of its previous owner. Is he interested?

Absolutely, and his assistant purchases it tout suite. Within days, he is owner of a heart-shaped box containing a dead man's suit (and, he hopes, a ghost). From the time he opens his UPS package, you know this is no lightweight story: it draws blood from the start and it keeps going for the jugular.

You see, the ghost is no ordinary ghost. This is not a harmless spectre, someone or something that cries "Ooooooo!" and uselessly and impotently floats around. It's the relative of someone from Jude's past, someone whose family has a bone to pick with him, so to speak. This is a ghost with presence — and power (not to mention the scariest eyes in modern fiction). No one is immune, no one is safe.

Nothing, no one, will stop this ghost from achieving his goal: Jude's total and utter destruction.

What can a ghost do? Oh, you'd be surprised. I was. With every chapter, Joe Hill came up with some fabulously scary stuff. Nothing is as it seems, whether it's the radio, the "muscle" car renovated for the love of it, faithful dogs, family history, Denny's — not even a person's past, and certainly not a person's future.

Hill is a great writer. His first collection of stories, 20th Century Ghosts, won awards and recognition from his peers and readers (including the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award,and the International Horror Guild Award). Only as his novel was about to hit the street did he admit to his representatives the truth: he is the son of Stephen and Tabitha King.

This news did not win him points in my book. Instead, I wanted him to make his bones with me. I read his dad's good stuff. I also read enough of his dad's not-as-good stuff to know that not everything King is gold. I needed proof that I could trust this author to scare me.

And he earned that trust. (However, every time I walked past the book, I sang the first verse of "Joe Hill.")

David and I read a chapter a night aloud, and it was very suspenseful and scary. More often than not, I would clutch David's arm as I read because the story or the images in the story were too creepy. I would not, could not, read ahead — for a number of reasons: chiefly because I was too scared to read it alone.

I am not the only one. My friend Lois told me she stopped reading at page 57 — and when we got there, I understood why. Without my Reading Buddy, I would have stopped before then.

I strongly recommend Heart-Shaped Box, but do not risk it without your Reading Buddy. This fabulous book is not to be read alone.