This collection has some great high-points, but there are also some stories that left me wanting a little more. Hill proves that he is a writer who thinks about process every bit as much as his father, Stephen King, as he provides both an introduction to the collection and notes to each of the stories. In some ways I liked reading about Hill's relationship with reading and writing and the way that he thinks about process even more than some of the stories. It is clear that he knows his influences and is a very conscientious artist. The clarity that he brings to these explanatory notes borders on some of the best writing advice that I gleaned from King's On Writing.
Rather than bumping through each of the stories, I am just going to hit upon a few that I liked the most and/or struck me in some way.
Probably my favorite story of the collection is "All I Care about is You," a futuristic, sci-fi story about a girl who pays for a robot companion on her birthday. The story hits a lot of notes that I really like in sci-fi: the world is lived in and shows signs of wear, it is not enamored of the future and isn't afraid to show some of it's ugly parts. For whatever technology may bring, there is still unhappiness and disappointment in the world. For an author, like Hill, who is not primarily a sci-fi writer, this is a profound stroke. There is a great turn in the story that I don't want to ruin here, but the interplay between the girl and the robot, and in particular the way that Hill writes the robot's simulated sincerity is very deep and well written.
"Late Returns" is ostensibly a story about a man grieving the deaths of his parents while working through a change in his life, taking a job driving a bookmobile. But this story is also about the relationship that readers have to their books and the way that they can draw us and touch us. This is something of a ghost story, but played in a low-key way that is very reminiscent of the story "20th Century Ghosts" from the book of the same name. In both stories, Hill draws a line from aesthetics to life and death that is fascinating to consider.
"Faun" is a great adventure/fantasy story with another good turn. Hill shows his skills with classic mis-direction and connects folklore with a critique of privilege in a not-overbearing way. This story has great momentum and offers compelling character studies of two of its key players.
In addition to all of the stories that work really well in this book, there are two that fell flat for me, and both because of the structure/conceit because there are great core ideas behind them. The first, "The Devil on the Staircase," is written in "staircases" instead of paragraphs. The story is pretty good but the structure is jarring and makes it difficult to read. The pages look like those that a terrified Wendy Torrance finds in Kubrik's adaptation of The Shining. In the note to this story, Hill bets his reader that they have never read a story written this way before. True, I haven't, but that isn't enough to recommend it.
"Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" is similarly bound up in its conceit. The entire story is written in tweets from a teenage girl on a family road trip. The family stumble into a circus that contains real zombies. Again, this is a neat story, but the structuring makes it difficult to read and, ultimately, doesn't add much to the story itself. I would rather have read a more straight-forward narrative that was peppered with tweets, or one that was more thematically about social media than just the structure.
The remainder of the stories are good and vary in their depth. The collection, overall, is a quality one and worth the read, however, I would still rank 20th Century Ghosts a little higher. I still have not yet read one of Hill's novels, though I have a couple of these on my next up pile.
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