20th Century Ghosts

20^th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill         Audio Book:  12 hours and 14 minutes         Paperback Book:  336 pages                  

Stephen King’s son, Joe Hillstrom King or better known in the written word world as Joe Hill has written a dazzling array of short horror stories.    Each one better than the last.   This guy covers everything and then some in the horror genre,  ghosts, haunted phones, haunted theaters, giant scary bugs, autistic younger brothers who have the ability to make forts  out of dixie cups that people go in but don’t come back out even when the fort is collapsed.    I’m not sure which is creepier, the music before, between and after each story or the stories themselves.    The story about Button Boy is a freakish eye-opener and introduction to what is to come.   Some of the topics Joe spun eery tales from had me wondering, was he just watching t.v. and picked topics of the day on the news then wrote horrific tales from that seed?    He just pops from one thing to the next and it is like he could come up with a story about anything.   It would make great t.v. or YouTube videos to have a set up where the audience could give a subject and then see what type of scary story Joe Hill could come up with about it, like a writer’s version of “Whose line is it, Anyway?”     This guy is good.   Some of the stories are a little intense and some of the things that take place a tad hard to take such as the ones that talk about stalkers kidnapping and killing people adults and children but then there are the lighter ones that seem to sprout from Urban Legends which are lighter and easier on the psyche.    Then there are the stories that just are so grim that they stick in your mind for days – you just can’t get the images out of your heard for a time.   The stories bounce from hideous to light hearted to comical here I am thinking about all the dead people who sign up to play zombies in a George Romero film.   Anyone who likes horror stories will enjoy this one, and reader if you do not find serial killers and often gruesome details of awful things being done to flesh, well, you might want to skip this one, but, if you do like action, surprising twists and turns and stories that get in your head – I can see where Joe Hill may get a cult following from this one.   Once I scrunch up my face and wrinkle my forehead to get through the rougher details mentioned it is titillating  to get to the end of the stories.    They don’t always end where you think they should and like real life sometimes they just stop abruptly or trail off and the reader is left to figure out what happens next.   It is a very good book as I am a fan of the horror but on the audio book the mood music to let you know when it begins and ends was a bit like fingernails on a chalkdboard so I almost found the music more disturbing than the stories.   Almost.    There are some really demented tales here folks.    Now this book would make a great book club in a bag selection because the open interpretations of these tales of the macabre would spark discussions for days, maybe weeks.    This book could actually be a course in how to write horror that lives on beyond the telling,   I can’t say you will lose any sleep over them but you will experience a feeling of unease maybe even anxiety at the real gritty telling of these chilling oddities.    Like a ride through a carnival haunted house followed by a walk through a cemetery at night followed by entering an asylum where all the bedlam is happening all around you and there are no guards whereupon leaving you end up having tea at that quiet neighbors’ house who has this dark side you never knew about.   Yeah, that is this book.    Horror fans will love it.   Fans of his Dad, Stephen King will love it.    Joe Hill is a true chip off the old block and in keeping with the flow here, that chip would have been gotten by hacking it off with an extremely sharp and bright shining axe, wait, is that blood?  Whaaaat?    Read it.   Or listen to it.   You will love it.   Avoid it like the plague if you are not a horror fan.  (Cheesy grin here with Vincent Price laughing maniacally in the background.)