Heart-Shaped Box (this is not a post about Nirvana)

Boy, oh boy, do I like Joe Hill.  I know I am late to the party on this one, but his books are the perfect combination of smart and easy-to-read.  His narratives weave the perfect path between innovation and predictability that is difficult to even describe.  His setups are good and then they take unexpected turns that keep his reader interested.  In this novel, he opens with an aging rockstar deciding to buy a ghost online from an auction site.
Judas Coyle, the goth rocker protagonist of the novel, is connected to the dead man in a particular way that is not revealed until later in the novel.  Jude buys the ghost as a curiosity because he has money to burn and learns later that he was set up by the seller to ensure his purchase.  This ghost was meant for him.
There is a lot of pleasure in discovering the rules of this haunting so I won't go too far into details of the narrative.
However, what I like about this book is the way that Coyle becomes more personable.  Hill is able to write this character in such a way that he can be appealing and shitty at the same time.  In fact, this is what Hill's character banks on for his professional success.  He is at the same time callous and sensitive, he can be caring and also ruthless.  The complexities of his character and his flaws make him more endearing.  In the beginning, Coyle believes that the haunting is motivated by revenge for what he may have done to the relative of the dead man.  This means that Coyle is at the same time sensitive to his own ability to hurt others and unwilling to make excuses for himself.  He never once tries to argue that his treatment by the dead man is unfair, he just wants to be free of the ghost.  Later in the novel when Coyle learns more about the nature of the haunting, and the man behind it, he doesn't feel particularly vindicated.  The motivations are other than what he had at first suspected, but Coyle knows that this doesn't really let him off the hook.
One thing that Hill is particularly good at is bending the reality that Judas Coyle experiences for his reader.  The ghost makes Coyle and those around him see altered versions of his reality, a future in which he has killed his family or girlfriend.  This does freak everybody out and it makes them question their version of reality and is genuinely spooky. 
Heart-Shaped Box is Joe Hill's first novel, and it is the first of his that I have read.  As I have mentioned in previous posts about Hill's work, I am still excited to continue to read him.

Full Throttle

Joe Hill's newest short story collection, Full Throttle, is as eclectic and fast-paced as 20th Century Ghosts.  I think that 20th Century Ghosts was among my favorite books that I read last year.  That book is chilling and thought-provoking at the same time.
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.

Legacy of Horror

I just finished reading Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts on recommendation from an old grad school friend of mine.  This friend and I share tastes in heavy metal and weird fiction, so this seemed like a promising book.  He told me that Hill is Stephen King's son and that the two shared some common sensibilities but that Hill had a better sense of humor.  Being a sometimes-fan of King, I took up the recommendation and found the book to be everything that my friend had promised.
The collection is strong with a few standouts.
The first story in the book, "Best New Horror," took me by surprise from the beginning.  The story is about a writer and editor of a famous horror collection, named Eddie Carroll, who is given a supremely creepy story that jerks him out of his complacency.  Carroll, wanting to include the story in his newest collection has some difficulty tracking down the author.  This is because the author is a bit of a drifter and has bounced around.  Carroll eventually does track down the author, but I will leave plot discussion at that because the reveal of the rest of the story is worth the read.  "Best New Horror" shares some common elements with King's fiction.  First, it tortures its writers the same way that King always has.  It also dabbles in the sort of metafiction that King always claimed was just "story-telling."  Hill handles it better, though.  He doesn't call more attention to it than necessary.  As postmodernism has shaded into post-postmodernism, the tropes become less tricks and become a part of the artistry.  So too, Hill buries the anxieties of writing and tiring of one's art in the story so that it seeps out in mood and characterization rather than being put into exposition.  The story shows more control of plotting than most of King's work.
The title story of the collection, "20th Century Ghost," is about a haunting in a movie theater.  The ghost of a young woman appears sporadically to lone move-goers, wanting to discuss whatever movie is playing at the time.  The elderly owner of the theater had first seen the ghost as a child and has tracked her appearances over his long lifetime working in and then managing the theater.  The ghost seems to only appear to those true cinephiles who will continue to work with film through their lives, though it is left to interpretation whether this is because of the ghost sighting.
Hill also ventures into the absurd in a story called "Pop Art."  In this story, the protagonist's best friend is a balloon.
Hill pays tribute to classic weird fiction in several of his stories, adding his own turn to each.  In "You Will Hear the Locust Sing," Hill invokes Kafka's Metamorphosis by envisioning a boy (Francis Kay, no less) who awakens to find himself transformed into a bug.  But rather than cower and efface himself to his family, Francis uses his new body to take revenge on those who have wronged him.  The story is thus transformed from Kafka's study in absurdity and futility into a fever-dream revenge story.  In "Abraham's Boys," the children of famed vampire hunter Van Helsing try to adapt to life in America after Van Helsing was forced to flee Denmark under a dark cloud.  Again, I don't want to get too far into plotting here because the treatment that Hill gives the character is better played out in the story than revealed here.
This short story collection is a great introduction to a newer generation of horror writing that travels some familiar territory in addition to providing some of its own original twists.  Hill, like his father, champions the downtrodden and seems to have a soft spot for troubled kids.  Unlike his father, however, Hill has a way of bringing out the humanity and hidden talents of these down-cast characters.  I was only two stories into this collection when I picked up a copy of NOS4A2 and I have every intention of diving deep into this author's work.