20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

Copyright Š 2005; ISBN 978-0-06-114797-5

To Leanora:
we are my favorite story

 

CONTENTS

Introduction by Christopher Golden

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

Voluntary Committal

Acknowledgments

Modern horror is not often subtle. Most of those who practice the art of the unsettling far too often go for the jugular, forgetting that the best predators are stealthy. Nothing wrong with going for the jugular, of course, but writers of genuine skill and talent have more than one trick in their bags.

Not all of the stories in
20th Century Ghosts
are horror stories, by the by. Some are wistfully supernatural, some are darkly disturbing mainstream fiction, and one lacks any trace of nastiness and is actually quite sweet. But they are subtle, friends and neighbors. Joe Hill is one stealthy bastard. Even the one about the kid who turns into a giant bug is subtle, and, let's face it, how often can you say that?

I first encountered Joe Hill as a name on a list of contributors to an anthology called
The Many Faces of Van Helsing
, edited by Jeanne Cavelos. Though I also had a story in that volume, I confess that I had not read any of the others when the time came for a small group signing at Pandemonium, a specialty bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Joe Hill was there, along with Tom Monteleone, Jeanne, and me.

At that point I'd never read a word he'd written, but as the day went on, I found myself growing curious about Joe Hill. The most interesting thing, to me, that came out of our conversations was that while he had a love for horror stories, they were far from his only love. He had published mainstream stories in "literary" magazines (and, believe me, I use that word so loosely it might just fall off) and won awards for them. Yet he found himself coming home to horror and dark fantasy time and again.

Be glad of that. If you aren't now, you soon will be.

I would've gotten around to reading
The Many Faces of Van Helsing
eventually, but in large part due to meeting Joe I moved it to the top of the stack. His story therein, "Abraham's Boys," was a chilling, textured examination of children who have begun to realize—as all children do—that their father is imperfect. It reminded me in the very best ways of the deeply unsettling independent film
Frailty
. "Abraham's Boys" is an excellent story that falls about halfway through the book you're currently holding, and it was good enough that it made me want to seek out more work by Joe Hill. But he'd published only short stories, and most in places that I wasn't likely to run across casually. In the back of my head I made a note to watch for his name in the future.

When Peter Crowther asked me if I'd be willing to read
20th Century Ghosts
and write an introduction, I knew I shouldn't agree. I haven't time to do much of anything other than write and be with my family, but the truth is, I wanted to read this book. I wanted to satisfy my curiosity, to find out if Joe Hill was really as good as "Abraham's Boys" indicated he might be.

He wasn't.

He was oh-so-much better.

The title of this volume is appropriate in myriad ways. Many of the tales involve ghosts in one form or another, and others reflect the effects of the 20th century's echoes. In "You Will Hear the Locust Sing," the author combines a fondness for and knowledge of the science fiction and monster films of the 1950s with the very same atomic fears that informed those films. The effect is both darkly humorous and heartfelt.

Yet perhaps the most significant way in which the title of this collection resonates is in the author himself. There is an elegance and tenderness to this work that is reminiscent of an earlier era, of Joan Aiken and Ambrose Bierce, of Beaumont and Matheson and Rod Serling.

At his best, Hill calls upon the reader to complete a scene, to provide the emotional response necessary for the story to truly be successful. And he elicits that response masterfully. These are collaborative stories that seem to exist only as the reader discovers them. They require your complicity to accomplish their ends. In the tale that leads off this volume, "Best New Horror," it is impossible not to recognize a certain familiarity and to realize where the tale is leading, but rather than a failing, this is its greatest achievement. Without the reader's feeling of almost jaded expectation, the story cannot succeed.

He draws you into the intimacy of "20th Century Ghost" and the desperation of "The Black Phone" so that you are a part of the tale, sharing the experience with the central characters.

Far too many writers seem to think there's no place in horror for genuine sentiment, substituting stock emotional response that has no more resonance than stage directions in a script. Not so in the work of Joe Hill. Oddly enough, one of the best examples of this is "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead," which is not a horror story at all, though it takes place on the set during the making of George Romero's classic film
Dawn of the Dead
.

I'd like to talk to you about every story in this book, but the danger of writing something that goes at the front of the book is in giving too much away. I can say that if it were possible to scour from my mind the memory of having read these stories, I would happily do so, just so that I could have the pleasure of reading them again for the first time.

"Better Than Home" and "Dead-Wood" are things of beauty. "The Widow's Breakfast" is a poignant snapshot of another era and of a man who has lost his way.

"20th Century Ghost" touches the nostalgic heart like many of my favorite episodes of
The Twilight Zone
. "You Will Hear the Locust Sing" is the love child of a menage a trois with William Burroughs, Kafka, and the movie
Them!
"Last Breath" is flavored with a hint of Bradbury. All of these stories are wonderful, some of them startlingly good. "My Father's Mask" is so weird and upsetting that it made me giddy.

"Voluntary Committal," the piece that closes this collection, is among the best novellas I have ever read, and speaks to the maturity of Joe Hill as a storyteller. It happens so rarely for a writer to pop up fully formed like this. And when it does ... well, I confess I am the victim of inner turmoil as I struggle between elation and the urge to beat the crap out of him. "Voluntary Committal" is that good.

"Pop Art," though ... "Pop Art" is transcendent. The single best short story I have read in years, it brings all of Joe Hill's abilities to bear in a few short pages—the weirdness, the tenderness, the complicity.

With the nascent efforts of a newly arrived author, fans and critics alike are wont to talk about their promise. Their potential.

The stories in
20th Century Ghosts
are promises fulfilled.

A month before his deadline, Eddie Carroll ripped open a manila envelope, and a magazine called
The True North Literary Review
slipped out into his hands. Carroll was used to getting magazines in the mail, although most of them had titles like
Cemetery Dance
and specialized in horror fiction. People sent him their books, too. Piles of them cluttered his Brookline townhouse, a heap on the couch in his office, a stack by the coffee maker. Books of horror stories, all of them.
No one had time to read them all, although once—when he was in his early thirties and just starting out as the editor of
America's Best New Horror
—he had made a conscientious effort to try. Carroll had guided sixteen volumes of
Best New Horror
to press, had been working on the series for over a third of his life now. It added up to thousands of hours of reading and proofing and letter-writing, thousands of hours he could never have back.

He had come to hate the magazines especially. So many of them used the cheapest ink, and he had learned to loathe the way it came off on his fingers, the harsh stink of it.

He didn't finish most of the stories he started anymore, couldn't bear to. He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul.

At some point following his divorce, his duties as the editor of
Best New Horror
had become a tiresome and joyless chore. He thought sometimes, hopefully almost, of stepping down, but he never indulged the idea for long. It was twelve thousand dollars a year in the bank, the cornerstone of an income patched together from other anthologies, his speaking engagements and his classes. Without that twelve grand, his personal worst-case scenario would become inevitable: he would have to find an actual job.

The True North Literary Review
was unfamiliar to him, a literary journal with a cover of rough-grained paper, an ink print on it of leaning pines. A stamp on the back reported that it was a publication of Katahdin University in upstate New York. When he flipped it open, two stapled pages fell out, a letter from the editor, an English professor named Harold Noonan.

The winter before, Noonan had been approached by a part-time man with the university grounds crew, a Peter Kilrue. He had heard that Noonan had been named the editor of
True North
and was taking open submissions, and asked him to look at a short story. Noonan promised he would, more to be polite than anything else. But when he finally read the manuscript, "Buttonboy: A Love Story," he was taken aback by both the supple force of its prose and the appalling nature of its subject matter. Noonan was new in the job, replacing the just-retired editor of twenty years, Frank McDane, and wanted to take the journal in a new direction, to publish fiction that would "rattle a few cages."

"In that I was perhaps too successful," Noonan wrote. Shortly after "Buttonboy" appeared in print, the head of the English department held a private meeting with Noonan to verbally assail him for using
True North
as a showcase for "juvenile literary practical jokes." Nearly fifty people cancelled their subscriptions—no laughing matter for a journal with a circulation of just a thousand copies—and the alumna who provided most of
True North
's funding withdrew her financial support in outrage. Noonan himself was removed as editor, and Frank McDane agreed to oversee the magazine from retirement, in response to the popular outcry for his return.

Noonan's letter finished:

I remain of the opinion that (whatever its flaws), "Buttonboy" is a remarkable, if genuinely distressing, work of fiction, and I hope you'll give it your time. I admit I would find it personally vindicating if you decided to include it in your next anthology of the year's best horror fiction.

I would tell you to enjoy, but I'm not sure that's the word.

Best,
Harold Noonan

 

Eddie Carroll had just come in from outside, and read Noonan's letter standing in the mudroom. He flipped to the beginning of the story. He stood reading for almost five minutes before noticing he was uncomfortably warm. He tossed his jacket at a hook and wandered into the kitchen.

He sat for a while on the stairs to the second floor, turning through the pages. Then he was stretched on the couch in his office, head on a pile of books, reading in a slant of late October light, with no memory of how he had got there.

He rushed through to the ending, then sat up, in the grip of a strange, bounding exuberance. He thought it was possibly the rudest, most awful thing he had ever read, and in his case that was saying something. He had waded through the rude and awful for most of his professional life, and in those flyblown and diseased literary swamps had discovered flowers of unspeakable beauty, of which he was sure this was one. It was cruel and perverse and he had to have it. He turned to the beginning and started reading again.
 

It was about a girl named Cate—an introspective seventeen-year-old at the story's beginning—who one day is pulled into a car by a giant with jaundiced eyeballs and teeth in tin braces. He ties her hands behind her back and shoves her onto the backseat floor of his station wagon ... where she discovers a boy about her age, whom she at first takes for dead and who has suffered an unspeakable disfiguration. His eyes are hidden behind a pair of round, yellow, smiley-face buttons. They've been pinned right through his eyelids—which have also been stitched shut with steel wire—and the eyeballs beneath.