The Web Haunt of Ryan K Lindsay

I was probably about ten when I read Stephen King’s Night Shift. It’s a short story anthology and I loved it so much when I read it. It was one of the few books that myself and my two brothers had read and so we discussed it a lot. It was also one of those books that lends itself to discussion. There’s lots of crazy ideas and scenarios that just ask your imagination to reach out and grab at a few stars. Gray Matter, The Boogeyman, Strawberry Spring, Night Surf, classics all of them. Wicked ideas and vignettes that just grab you. They still haven’t let go.

I hate to start a Joe Hill review by talking about his father, that’s pretty crappy of me, but it also shows you what I think of his short story anthology. Reading 20th Century Ghosts gives me the same feeling I had when I first read King’s shorts. There’s a feeling of losing yourself in every scene, and being left with a concept, or an idea, that will stick with me for a while.

I’ll run down each story, because they deserve as much. And. Here. We. Go.

Best New Horror
This story is creepy. A horror anthology editor tracks down a very unsettling story that does admittedly show a lot of promise. He eventually tracks down the author, but he’ll regret it. The story sets the scene very well but it’s all about the ending. I finished this story just before bed and I’ll admit it made me think a bit before I turned the light off. A great lead off story.

20th Century Ghost
This tale is simple and sweet and it works because of all the little details that Hill salts throughout his yarn. A ghost haunts a cinema for a few decades and it isn’t so much what she does, it’s what it all means. Lovely little piece that showed me that Hill was after showing heart as well as squeezing mine. Very impressive in a stately manner.

Pop Art
This is a story about a guy remembering his best friend when he was twelve, Art. Art is an inflatable person, a real person but made out of inflated plastic instead of skin. He has no organs, just air within him. He can’t talk he just writes notes with crayon. He’s still, and surprisingly, pretty awesome. This premise is so weird but I found myself loving it because Hill crafts such real characters. It’s a completely unique story but I fell straight into it like a manhole in my path as I gazed at the stars. This made me smile and feel that sadness within me that’s usually hard to get in just 20 pages.

You Will Hear The Locust Sing
This is a strange story that sort of takes a different approach to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and knows it’s doing it. A high school kid wakes to find himself as a five foot tall locust. He then goes about his day as realistically as you would if you woke up as that sort of creature. It’s an interesting tale, and food for thought, but not the greatest of the collection.

Abraham’s Boys
This is about the two boys that Van Helsing has with Mina Harker. It’s very well done and bloody interesting. I don’t want to spoil anything, but this story is unbelievably well written and really grabbed me. I’d love to write something like this, you know, the descendants of literary characters; Danny Torrence all grown up and shining still, or the family left behind in The Moon And Sixpence.

Better Than Home
This sweet tale is about an autistic boy and how he interacts with his major league baseball coach father. It’s simple and sweet and ends really well. It’s a character piece and Hill crafts it all so well.

The Black Phone
A disturbing tale of a serial killer and his victim. Hill still manages to sneak in the little pieces of small town Americana and the story is all the better for it. The victim, locked in the basement of the killer, finds a phone that rings, and the dead speak to him from the other end. The ending of the story is good, but I would have taken out that last line. Just didn’t fit the tone at all (but I can see how you’d want to put it in…).

In The Rundown
A bit of a delinquent boy walks home and find a violent scene where he’s either stuck with the killer or he’s not helping the victim. I know which it is, but it is left so ambiguous that i can’t help but offer the alternative. There’s no real ending, but that’s kinda cool. Very much a vignette where the journey is everything.

The Cape
A cape may or may not have given the boy who always wore it the ability to fly. His life slips away from him over the coming years, and Hill does a great job of making it all believable and relatable. Then there’s the ending. The ending is so great that I’m smiling right now. This one is up there with Pop Art, but it so different to that tale.

Last Breath
A family visit a museum of last breaths. A strange old man has collected the last, rasping, death rattle of many different people. He has them on display and using a stethoscope-type instrument you can listen to what these breaths have to say. It’s a simple concept, and an effective one that is turned into a simple yet effective and elegant tale. Perfectly sculpted to have a short and sharp effect.

Dead-Wood
A very strange two page vignette about trees as ghosts. More emotion than plot, but enjoyable, much like a poem.

The Widow’s Breakfast
A steam-train hobo mourns his dead friend and is given breakfast in his travels by a widow. This tale is strange and poignant and plays like a soft song. It doesn’t cover too much ground, but it’s more about just looking at these two disparate people looking at life. The ending is also quite effective as a little punch to the character, and the reader.

Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead
Everything in this story seems to mean two things; the title, the last line, the lives of everyone involved, Bobby, his old sweetheart (sort of) and her son, Bobby. It’s set on the set of the original Dawn of the Dead and involves the three main characters serving as zombie extras for the Romero classic. They haven’t seen each other in years and they catch up as best they can. It’s quite a sweet story, with no real horror at all except for the fact they are on a horror movie set, and covered in zombie gore. Cameos by Romero and FX whiz Tom Savini are also effective and didn’t take me out of the tale at all.

My Father’s Mask
I’ll be honest, perhaps not quite sure that I got all of this one. It’s a bizarre story about a boy going to a family cabin with his parents and then being warned about the playing card people. The boy goes for a walk in the woods and things get ever stranger, but I don’t know if in a good way. It’s worth reading, maybe you’re smarter than me, but I know it is probably the only story that I would skip and not reread on the day I come back to this book.

Voluntary Committal
Nolan watches as his brother, Morris, builds elaborate forts out of old boxes and then watches as each structure becomes more intricate than the last. Eventually the forts start to branch off into strange places that were not there before. From the very beginning of this one you know what will happen, but it’s damn good fun getting there. Hill sets the characters up so they are what’s important, not the scenes around them. That’s good writing.

Acknowledgments/Scheherazade’s Typewriter
Hill thanks his supporting cast of editors and publishers and then sneaks in another three page tale. When a writer dies his typewriter keeps going off at the same time each night. The daughter waits to load it with paper over time and enjoys the stories that come forth. No one else believes her, but that’s probably not important anymore. What’s important is that she has the stories.

Overall, I really bloody enjoyed this book. There are so many chilling stories, or interesting characters, or great concepts, that i chewed through this quickly and would do so again in the future. I am hugely impressed with Hill’s style of getting a nice narrative and reflection balance happening in each tale. This book is great stuff and has a little bit of everything, horror, supernatural, romance, fantasy, bizarre, genius, and humour. There was only one story that didn’t resonate with me, but so many that did.

If I had to pick a favourite story, and believe me, I do, I know that Voluntary Committal would probably come close, and The Cape would be second, but the top dog honour would have to go to Pop Art. There’ll never be another story remotely like it, and there was never any warning that something like it could be done. Genius, there’s no other word.

Go on and check it out. Then come back and read this again, you’ll enjoy the review the second time around as well. Go on. Enjoy.

Posted on October 18th, 2009 by ryan
Filed under: books