King Arthur Movie Tristan

title: 20th Century Ghosts


author: Joe Hill

genre: horror

published: 2005

pages: 311

rated: 4 out of 5

Imogene is young, beautiful . . . and dead, waiting in the Rosebud Theater one afternoon in 1945. . . .


Francis was human once, but now he's an eight-foot-tall locust, and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. . . .


John is locked in a basement stained with the blood of half a dozen murdered children, and an antique telephone, long since disconnected, rings at night with calls from the dead. . . .


Nolan knows but can never tell what really happened in the summer of '77, when his idiot savant younger brother built a vast cardboard fort with secret doors leading into other worlds. . . .


The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. . . .

After reading Heart Shaped Box, I really wanted to pick this book up as well.


The short stories included are:

Best New Horror, 20th Century Ghost, Pop Art, You Will Hear The Locust Sing, Abraham's Boys, Better Than Home, The Black Phone, In The Rundown,
The Cape, Last Breath, Dead-Wood, The Widow's Breakfast,
Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead, My Father's Mask and Voluntary Committal.




I enjoyed reading 20th Century Ghosts. Not all the stories were scary, some were just strange...kind of like something you might see on the The Twilight Zone.

I thought Pop Art was interesting, it was so bizarre. I have never read anything like that before, about a boy who is made out of plastic, but I think it's all up to interpretation.

You Will Hear The Locust Sing grossed me out, I could have done without reading this one. A young boy wakes up to find he has turned into a giant locust, with an urge to kill and eat.


Abraham's Boys was actually like a mini spin off of Bram Stoker's Dracula. It was disturbing and has Van Helsing in it along with his two young sons. He's not a nice guy and is still hunting vamps.

Max fumbled with the picture frame, struggling to fit the calotype of the murdered woman back into place...then saw something else, went still again. He had not until this instant taken note of the figure to the far left in the photograph, a man on the near side of the bed.

Better Than Home and In The Rundown weren't scary. The story 20th Century Ghost , about a ghost that haunts a theater, wasn't scary either.




Best New Horror was nice & freaky. And the ending leaves it up to the readers imagination, sometimes this annoys me, but this time it worked. It was a good short and creepy tale.


The Black Phone creeped me out too, I couldn't put the book down at that point, I needed to see what happened to the kidnapped boy and the haunted phone.



Last Breath was really good. It's about a man who captures dying peoples last breaths and showcases them in a museum.



My Father's Mask was very creepy. A 13 year old goes to an isolated cabin with his strange parents. When they get to the cabin, there are masks all over the place...soon enough the boy finds his parents wearing these masks.

He wore the clear plastic mask that had been hanging in the window of the great room the night before. It squashed the features beneath, flattening them oput of their recognizable shapes. He stared at me blankly, as if he didn't know I was lying there in the bed, or perhaps as if he didn't know me at all.

I've been on a book ban since August, but I broke it recently to purchase this book.
All in all, this collection of short stories was pretty good. I didn't like the stories that weren't scary though, I felt like okay what are these doing in this collection? Like Dead-Wood , which was barely two pages long.

But the ones that were scary, did really creep me out.
I liked Heart Shaped Box better though. I hope Joe Hill continues to write novels.



the author: Joe Hill

I mentioned before that Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King. I think the two have similar writing styles.








visit the author's website: http://joehillfiction.com/