20th-Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
Sep. 27th, 2008 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsA collection from the author of Heart-Shaped Box. Some horror, as you would expect, but also just a lot of fiction with a touch of the supernatural.
Damn but that's a good book. I knew for sure during the opening story, "Best New Horror," in which our narrator is an anthology editor who gives us a one-page synopsis of a novella manuscript he receives, and the compressed summary made me forget where I was. Right on through the weird and metafictional "Pop Art" (bad! Pun! Alert!) and the amazing little vignette "Dead-Wood" and the totally inexplicable but fascinating "My Father's Mask." The closing novella, "Voluntary Committal," about a boy with childhood onset Schizophrenia (or possibly not) who can build things that he shouldn't, gathers up everything good about this book. It's tense, rich storytelling, the sort that makes you feel like you have to figure out how to breathe again when you put it down.
It's not all great. This is a book about fathers and sons, if you know what I mean, and there aren't many well-drawn female characters who aren't also victims. Interestingly, though, what this book does have is a fair share of disabled people – Asperger's, Schizophrenia, learning disabilities. And, wonder of wonders, the disability isn't an outer manifestation of evil.
But yeah. Damn.
Damn but that's a good book. I knew for sure during the opening story, "Best New Horror," in which our narrator is an anthology editor who gives us a one-page synopsis of a novella manuscript he receives, and the compressed summary made me forget where I was. Right on through the weird and metafictional "Pop Art" (bad! Pun! Alert!) and the amazing little vignette "Dead-Wood" and the totally inexplicable but fascinating "My Father's Mask." The closing novella, "Voluntary Committal," about a boy with childhood onset Schizophrenia (or possibly not) who can build things that he shouldn't, gathers up everything good about this book. It's tense, rich storytelling, the sort that makes you feel like you have to figure out how to breathe again when you put it down.
It's not all great. This is a book about fathers and sons, if you know what I mean, and there aren't many well-drawn female characters who aren't also victims. Interestingly, though, what this book does have is a fair share of disabled people – Asperger's, Schizophrenia, learning disabilities. And, wonder of wonders, the disability isn't an outer manifestation of evil.
But yeah. Damn.