20th Century Ghosts

Rating 4.25/5

20th Century Ghosts is not a horror collection in the conventional sense. It’s literary fiction first—cleanly written, character-driven, emotionally attentive—with horror and speculative elements used as pressure, not spectacle. Monsters, when they appear, are rarely the point. Inheritance, stalled lives, authority, and quiet moral failure are.

Hill’s greatest strength here is his sympathy for what I’d call the slight loser: not the hopeless, not the heroic, but the person who peaked early, recalibrated downward, and never quite re-entered the current of ambition. These characters feel real because they are rarely redeemed and never mocked. Hill loves them, even when he lets the world crush them. That love gives show more the collection its emotional weight.

Not every story landed for me. Several are deliberately gentle—sometimes too gentle. Hill occasionally leans into sweetness and possibility in ways that feel at odds with my own reading temperament. Those stories aren’t bad, but they feel like they belong to a different emotional register, one I’m less interested in staying inside.

“My Father’s Mask” was the only story I actively disliked. I understand what it’s doing—ritual, inheritance, permission passed without language—but it felt deliberately opaque, surreal to the point of emotional distance. It wants disorientation as its effect, and while I respect that choice, it didn’t reward the effort for me.

Then there is “You Will Hear the Locust Sing.” This story is the exception that redefines the book. It is, without exaggeration, the emotionally hardest thing I have ever read. Not because of gore or shock, but because of how it retroactively reconfigures everything that comes before it. Once you see what it’s doing, your brain cannot move on. The horror isn’t metaphor—it’s moral availability. The story damages the reader in a way that feels intentional, and I would genuinely argue it deserves a warning not for content, but for aftereffects.

Other standouts—“The Cape,” “The Rundown,” “Voluntary Committal,” “Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead”—circle the same core concerns: talent without discipline, effort that doesn’t save you, intelligence that becomes dangerous, and the ethics of restraint. Hill is cautious where Stephen King is hopeful. He doesn’t assume action improves outcomes. Often, he suggests the opposite.

Taken as a whole, 20th Century Ghosts is deeply literary, sometimes unsettlingly so. I didn’t love every story, but I respected almost all of them. Even when Hill loses me, he’s doing it thoughtfully. This is a collection less interested in frightening you than in sitting with you afterward—quietly, insistently—until you notice what’s changed. show less

Joe Hill is without a doubt one of the best Dark Fiction authors. And 20th Century Ghosts is really a showcase for just how much talent Hill has as a writer. I wouldn’t call this collection of short stories Horror per se, the stories are much too bizarre for that label. I would characterize this more abstractly as a short story collection from a macabre and twisted imagination that makes Stephen King’s work down right normal. With Hill perfectly ordinary events and people are twisted to elicit a reaction. Very few supernatural elements are used to set up the moment of shock. Hill isn’t the first author to try this in the Horror genre but he has quickly mastered the technique. He has a way of twisting the mundane into the surreal show more without going too far with the premise to make it an outlandish parody.

My one knock on the collection of stories, and it’s a pretty big knock, is that the endings are so flat. Really great writing is rendered dull by some of the most predictable and uninspired closings I’ve ever read in the horror genre. It’s really too bad because Joe Hill can do so much better.

My advice is to buy the Kindle singles with the highest ratings to get a taste of the very best Joe Hill has to offer. It’ll be less expensive than buying the collection. show less

Rating: 4.5 of 5

20th Century Ghosts WOWed me! I loved Hill's take on "ghosts." I loved that the collection included horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and mainstream fiction. But what I loved most was that I could (can) still remember all 16 stories (there was one hidden in the Acknowledgments), and there were only two I didn't like. Frequent readers of short stories know how rare that is.

Hands down my absolute favorite of the collection was My Father's Mask. After I finished it I sat dazed for about 15 minutes. Then I just sat there, staring at the wall, and thought about it for another 30 minutes. Finally I had to consult the Net to see if others reacted the same way. Sure enough, I was not alone. I'll be thinking about this story for I don't show more know how many days (weeks? years?) to come.

Best New Horror was pure fun, and a warning to all us horror nuts who think we'd never end up like one of those characters. HA! Voluntary Committal, The Black Phone, The Cape - all equally creepy and brilliant.

Highly recommended to fans of psychological horror and/or great storytelling. If you're looking for tons of BOO! in your face scares or a splatterfest, skip this one for now, but come back to it when you want something deeper and, at times, more frightening. show less

The title couldn't be more accurate, because these stories all feature characters that are haunted--haunted by their pasts, by inner demons, by troubled childhoods, and horrible secrets. Identity seems to be the common theme that connects these stories--how do we decide who we are? Is it a gift (or a curse) from our families? Do we decide ourselves who we are? Do we embrace our secret self (You Will Hear the Locust Sing, The Cape), do we run from it (Best New Horror), do we hide from it (Voluntary Committal)? Are we predetermined to become our parents (My Father's Mask)?

Joe Hill displays incredible talent in this book. NOTE: Many of the stories feature threatened children. If this sort of thing bothers you, stay away.

Joe Hill is one of my favorite fiction writers. His dad was more formative for me as a reader and writer, but Joe is more my style. Maybe it's the generation thing.

Anyway, I bring up Stephen King because (it's unavoidable when talking about Joe Hill and) I sometimes feel like Joe wrestles with his legacy. You can feel it from time to time, echoes of Stephen King in a way that so many people have tried but no one other than Joe could have a chance of accomplishing.

I used to lament this because it was apparent from the outset to me that Joe had his own identity. His writing more often than not feels more intimate, personal, and honest.

In 20th Century Ghosts, I feel like we get a heavy dose of that. It is, by no means, a perfect show more collection of stories, but I think that imperfection is an asset for a writer whose career seems written in prophecy. We get Joe Hill writing incredibly self-aware horror. We get Joe Hill writing realism. We get Joe Hill writing bizarre fantasy. We get Joe Hill taking chances. We get Joe Hill playing it straight. We get Joe Hill as he's clearly maturing as a writer, and we get Joe Hill at perhaps his most refined, because he was still at a place in his career in which it was okay to spend thousands of hours on a handful of words.

Story collections are fantastic opportunities to get to know writers. I'm not sure this one is the best entry point for Joe Hill, but I think it's one for any Joe Hill fan to cherish. show less

I took some time over this book, not because I wasn’t hooked, but because I dip in and out of books of short stories. If you’re expecting to get Stephen King type stories (Joe Hill being his son), think again. There’s an element of that — after all, Hill has read his father’s stories for years, but these are undoubtedly from his own imagination. Hill is not a replica of his father. This collection shows what writers can achieve when they truly think outside the box without fear of having readers wonder what the hell they just read. And yes, I wondered. There’s horror here, but that’s not all. Sometimes the most disturbing moments are the most ordinary. Abraham’s Boys sticks in the mind, as does Voluntary Committal, which show more makes a nice novella to end the collection. The Black Phone film took the best from the short story found in this book, and built on it — a slight disappointment here for me because I saw the film first. My Father’s Mask has to be the most open to interpretation and I’m unsure I liked it. You Will Hear the Locust Sing is truly strange, as is Pop Art, yet the latter stays with you. In the introduction, Christopher Golden calls it transcendent. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it has a peculiar haunting quality and it’s not horror or a ghost story. This is a difficult collection to recommend, as enjoyment will depend on the open-mindedness of the reader to accept extraordinary stories. show less

Hill's collection of short stories if a phenomenal and varied collection. With a combination of eeriness, supernatural turns, and characters or plots which are simply dark (and all too believable), the collection moves from moment to moment like a beautifully twisted roller coaster. Hill's writing brings each of them to life in turn, and it's difficult to put down the collection at any point. Unlike so many collections where themes and characters seem to be repeated in different settings or times, Hill's work is so varied that each story seems to present its own universe, and Hill's talent is undeniable in each one.

Absolutely recommended.