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.

A Good and Happy Child — Review by Chris

Do you believe in demons? Demonic possession? What would you need for irrefutable evidence of such a thing? And exactly what would you do with the information when you got it?

Some perfectly good books let readers off the hook, let them set down the book and shake it off because "it's only a novel." By the end of A Good and Happy Child, readers who are brave enough will ask themselves what they could permit themselves to believe — and admit only to themselves at the end of the day as they shut off the light on the nightstand.

The book begins when George is 30 years old and has a son whom he cannot touch or even approach. Being in the same room with the infant frightens him, and he literally cannot be alone with his own child. After six months, George agrees to see a therapist. In their first encounter, George eludes to a childhood experience that might have affected his current situation, which the therapist asks him to record in notebooks.

The novel is a tapestry that weaves the notebook content with George's current life experiences. Author Justin Evans moves deftly between the two times. While I'm with the adult, I can't wait to get back to his childhood. When I am reading about the child, I'm compelled to wish myself forward to see how it all winds up.

The writing is fresh and vivid. I am able to picture the situation, the location, his home, his friends, his family. I am there, and I am captivated. There are many moments that require reflection, and these are a pleasure to contemplate. Even now, long after the last page has been turned, I still think about a scene, or a conversation, and what it ultimately meant to the characters in the novel.

The novel begins at a comfortable pace and accelerates as the story progresses. When I got to the part where the police began searching the nearby woods, I read with my mouth agape, fearing that my prediction was correct. I can understand why the ending made the author's wife wake up screaming in the middle of the night after she read it. (Of course, she read multiple iterations, so I can only imagine what previous drafts might have contained.) However, for me, it was the material that immediately proceeded that gave me my nightmares. As the tension built, I suspected the worst, and that's what I got. It was creepier and more moving than I expected, but it was perfect, sheer genius and blood-curdling.

Frankly, this reads more like a rich memoir than a novel — which is fabulous for the reader but makes me worry deeply for the writer. When we ask how much the writer delved into his own psyche for material, I pray he did not. I pray that his long conversations with Jesuit priests in the dark quiet of the office after hours, the obscure materials he might have dredged up on Lexis-Nexus, his own quirky perspective of stories he read as a child, maybe even stories told around the campfire in his native Virginia, are what make this story so compelling.

The Ruins - Review by Chris

In a New York Times ad for The Ruins, Stephen King states that he found it a scary read. I wanted to see what frightens a man whose novel about vampires prompted me to wear a cross in seventh grade. I also had liked Scott Smith's story A Simple Plan (whose screenplay was amazing and taut.)

I did not get the horror novel I expected.

Rather, I got a very well-crafted character-driven suspense novel with horror elements, and excellent summer fare. This book should be consumed while the reader feels perspiration trickle between her shoulder blades and a glass of iced tea sweats on the table next to her. (Sandy beach optional.) I read this book as a palate cleanser before I started some of the more intense novels and involved non-fictions in my stack, and I got what I bargained for.

I just wish it had started faster.

After about 40 pages of character development — and only Stephen King's endorsement spurring me on — the players finally get busy: four Americans on holiday in Cancún volunteer to help a new German friend retrieve his brother from the unmet youth's ill-advised side trip to Mayan ruins. They are joined by a Greek who knows no English but is well-versed in the Language of Tequila.

Along the way, they get Clues: a bad beginning, awkward warnings from strangers, blocked and hidden paths. None of these change their course and they discover, too late, why the Mayan-speaking residents of the small village near the ruins were waving them away — and why a single step sealed their fate.

Smith’s writing is like embroidery: each strand is vital and contributes to the image. In The Ruins, he wanted to make sure we knew the characters before the action began because the characters are what compel the story.

However, I want my character development as part of the action. The tension between the characters, how they accept the reality of their situation, how they act in adversity — that all comes from the action. Spoiled twenty-somethings getting drunk on the beach do not interest me. An Eagle Scout who tries to remember the important points of distilling urine does.

I want my suspense or horror stories to grip me from the beginning or I may not trust the author to deliver the scary stuff. I do not need the monster to show up on page one, but I need the author to show me there is a path to the monster that starts on page one.

The Ruins is definitely worth reading — but as a library read, or a book I'd buy for a dime at a library sale for a beach house bookshelf.