Literacy 2025: Book 14: 20th Century Ghosts

Book
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Synopsis
A collection of short stories that includes “The Black Phone,” possibly his best-known story because of its movie adaptation.

Notes
Until now, the only piece of Joe Hill’s work that I’d read was his excellent Locke & Key comics with Gabriel Rodriguez. Or I should say, the only piece that I could remember reading, because several of the stories in 20th Century Ghosts seemed undeniably familiar, as if I’d read this collection or, more likely, the stories collected elsewhere.

As the introduction states, the title of the collection is more of a metaphor than a packing list: only two of the stories could really be called ghost stories (“20th Century Ghost” and “The Black Phone”), and many of them aren’t even horror. Instead, there’s a common theme of echoes from the 20th century and its pop culture, presumably many of the things that interest Hill personally: horror in all its various formats, baseball, movies, science fiction, super-heroes and -villains, and, frequently, dysfunctional families.

Locke & Key was brilliant, but it also weighed heavily on me. It always seemed to be straddling my line of comfort and propriety, spending most of its time on the side of fascinating fantasy horror, then unexpectedly hopping over into what seemed like unnecessary cruelty or delighting in its characters’ misery. Hill spends a lot of 20th Century Ghosts jumping back and forth over that line, with stories that are original, imaginative, and masterfully written; that sometimes feel cruel in their lurid descriptions of poverty, learning disabilities, or complete over-the-top contempt for fat people. It’s just odd to be reading a story that seems to be touching on universal ideas, and then suddenly encounter something so needlessly exclusionary.

So it was a brilliant choice to start the collection with “Best New Horror,” which I think is an outstanding (fictional) encapsulation of horror fiction not just as a genre but a fandom. I’d call it a “defense” of horror, but it’s written with the sense of confident assertion that it doesn’t need to be defended. He describes two lurid, boundary-pushing horror stories, but with a sense of detachment, so that it doesn’t give the sense of wallowing in the gruesome details, but giving just enough to leave a disturbing image in the reader’s mind. Then he acknowledges the ways that horror fans are seen as “off” or troubled by people who don’t share their love of the genre, and the ways that the fandom attracts so many tiresome and unimaginative people who do just want to wallow in the gruesome details, with no real sense of artistry. And then he ends with a description of why he loves the genre, why he’s eager to find the boundaries of taste and propriety, and why pushing, pulling, and dancing over them gives the exhilarating feeling of being alive.

Another standout story is “Pop Art,” one of the sweetest and most imaginative in the collection, suggesting a ton of metaphors but never allowing itself to be reduced to just one simple idea. I also liked “Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead,” a lost-loves story set during the filming of Dawn of the Dead; “Last Breath,” a good old-fashioned creepy story that wouldn’t be at all out of place in a Ray Bradbury collection; and “The Cape,” which I like mostly for consistently refusing to do what I expected it to do next. One of the best concepts is “You Will Hear the Locust Sing,” a 50s sci-fi-inspired homage to Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” but I thought it failed in the execution, giving in too much to pointless contempt for its white trash characters.

Verdict
This collection is incontrovertible proof of Joe Hill’s considerable talent. Far from being “just” a horror writer, he confidently and masterfully switches between tone, setting, voice, time period, and genre; even in the stories that I don’t like very much, the writing is excellent. He has a particular gift for knowing exactly how to end a story: rarely allowing it to settle on just one idea, but stopping at just the right moment, to let you feel the full weight of what’s going to happen next.