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496 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
…a child has only the two parents, but if you’re lucky enough to be an artist for a living, ultimately you wind up with a few mothers and fathers. When someone asks a writer, ”Who’s your daddy?” the only honest answer is, “That’s complicated.”You might need some version of Ancestry.com to label all the literary influences at play in Joe Hill’s latest story collection. Or maybe not, as Hill gives us a pretty good idea right off the bat, in the introduction. Pretty obvious who influencer number one might be. In fact, dad is listed as co-author on two of the thirteen stories. But the writerly genetic material that feeds these stories comes from some pretty heavy hitters, like Ray Bradbury, Bernard Malamud, Lawrence Block, Stephen Spielberg, George Romero, and the publication Fangoria (Fango to fans). Part of the fun of reading this collection is to think about the influencers noted in the intro and suss out what manifests where. Hill adds some further explanatory comments at the end of the collection, which furthers our appreciation a bit.
A book of stories isn’t a novel and can’t have the simple narrative drive of a novel. I think it should still try to have a feeling of progression, of connectedness. It’s like a road trip. You’re staying in a different inn every night: One evening it’s a romantic Victorian B&B with a supposedly haunted gazebo out back, the next it’s a cruddy Motel 6 with what looks like old bloodstains on the ceiling. The places where you stop to rest and dream are unique—but the road is the same, always waiting to carry you on to whatever’s next. And when it’s over, you’ve arrived someplace new, someplace (you hope) with a good view. A place to breathe deep and take it all in.Or maybe kiss your ass goodbye. This is Hill’s first short story collection since 20th Century Ghosts, which came out in 2005. (Strange Weather being a collection of novellas) But it is not like he stopped writing stories in the intervening fifteen years. The stories here come from as long ago as 2006. Several have been published elsewhere, sometimes in surprising formats.
The air was redolent with the cloying perfume of cotton candy, an odor that doesn’t exist in nature and can only be described as “pink” smell. There was always a puddle of vomit on the boardwalk that had to be avoided. There were always soggy bits of popcorn floating in the puke. There were a dozen sit-down restaurants where you could pay too much for fried clams and wait too long to get them.It also featured a carousel called the Wild Wheel. Clearly not their first rodeo, this group looks like they have been burned, and are screaming. Enjoy the ride. A group of 19-year-olds, full of themselves and a bit too much alcohol, behave badly and get an unexpected something extra. A couple of the characters are named for the hitman in dad’s Battleground. Look also for a reference to a Hill novel tucked in between the animals. The story was released as an audio book, on vinyl, read by Nate Corrdry.
is, I suppose, my attempt to write a David Mitchell story. Mitchell is the author of Cloud Atlas, Blackswangreen, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and over the last decade I’ve sort of fallen in love with his sentences—which float and dip and soar like kites—and with his gift for kaleidoscopic narratives that quickly shift from one time and place and perspective to another.On a long flight headed east across the USA, we see the interactions, perspectives, and motivations of nine characters as they cope with the stress and with each other during a particularly dark stretch. Very nicely done.