Review: "20th Century Ghosts"

 

HILL, Joe, 20^th Century Ghosts (2008), HarperCollins, London.

Octavo; hardcover; 336pp. Near fine in like dustwrapper.

I have only one thing to say about this collection of short stories – buy it. Buy it now. If you don’t, you will regret it for the rest of your life.

Many people think that horror writing or ghost stories have nothing to offer in terms of literary merit: this is the collection which puts all of that debate to rest. This is the real deal – scary writing and the human condition in one slick volume.

It’s no secret that “Joe Hill” is the pen name for Stephen King’s son; however, to give him credit, this guy is not riding anyone’s coattails to where he wants to be. His material is solid and focused, and harvesting the nightmare realms of his forebears in a way that they couldn’t imagine.

I have a caveat to add here: Joe is a great short story writer. I’m not sold on his novels; I’ve read Heart-Shaped Box and there was a definitely a point where I thought the end had passed by and now we were just wallowing in a bunch of loose-end tying. Excellent concept; great execution: a sad party-balloon deflating in the third act.

I have high expectations for Horns: I’ve read an extract, downloaded to my Sony E-Reader, and I loved every second...anyway; we’ll see...

20th Century Ghosts, on the other hand, is amazing. It grabs all the elements of a great ghost story and moves them unequivocally into the modern era. The standout stories are “Pop Art”, “When the Locust Sings”, and the title track: any one of these will make you a confirmed ghost story aficionado if you aren’t already.

Joe breathes the notion that half of any ghost story is the sadness that an untimely demise conjures; the essential humanity that the life and death process entails. These stories talk about the human condition; the premises are outré and dark but we catch the reality of these situations and cannot but help to make them our own: in every one we find our place and Joe takes us to a satisfying conclusion.

This is not the splatterpunk indulgence which we’ve seen previously and to which Joe Hill is the generational heir: ordinarily we’d expect him to wander down this path but he steadfastly ploughs his own terrain. As well, this isn’t the B-grade schlock that his father habitually delivers at his worst. This is a different beast entirely.

I have a genuine dislike of “literary” writing. It’s not that I have a hatred of literature – quite the opposite in fact. It’s just that nowadays, things are categorised as either “literary fiction” or “genre fiction”, the latter term being applied with a sense of the low-brow, and applied variously to historical fiction (Ken Follett, Georgette Heyer, Patrick O’Brien), romance (Barbara Cartland, Jodi Picoult), thrillers (Lee Child, Robert Ludlum, John le Carré), crime (Patricia Cornwell, Reginald Hill, Anne Perry) and horror... you know who they are. This parcelling-up is a direct result of marketing and has been created to focus our dollars more expediently. Realistically speaking, the term “literary fiction” is simply a label to cover everything that can’t be neatly categorised. It’s simply a file marked ‘miscellaneous’ with pretensions.

Not that there aren’t good things inside that file; equally, there a good things in all the other files: it’s just that we’ve been led into thinking that “literary fiction” is somehow ‘better’ than so-called “genre fiction”. Demonstrably, this is not always the case. The term “literature” is not always a guarantee of excellence, just as the term “generic” isn’t always a stamp of low-quality.

Strangely enough, this bookstore categorisation is largely a hallmark of the English language: other languages tend not to pigeonhole their reading the way that we do. Truman Capote claimed that he had ‘invented’ the “non-fiction novel” when he wrote In Cold Blood and the question as to the validity of this term has plagued English literature students ever since; the notion hardly caused a stir amongst, for example, German readers, for whom the concept had been around for years. But back to Joe Hill:

If we have to employ the term “literary” then Mr Hill’s work ticks all of the boxes in order to qualify. He is unequivocally writing ghost and horror stories in this collection but they are all of a very high calibre indeed, a quality that definitely deserves the title ‘literature’. He makes great use of the metaphorical approach to spooky writing – werewolf as coming-of-age tale; vampire as cross-cultural divide; monster as stigma. However his approaches are all well-considered, deftly-explored and surprising in their follow-through. Could anyone expect that a story about a young boy estranged from his father and transformed mysteriously into a gigantic locust would be a tale about that child’s coming to an understanding and acceptance of his father? Or that the stigma of being Jewish in an unaccepting community would be replicated in the story of a young boy who, as distinct from his peers, is an inflatable balloon character? I certainly didn’t see it coming.

In summary, this is a fantastic collection of stories that will exhilarate and delight anyone who dips into it. Yes, it has gore and ghosts and monsters; but it also has sadness, wonder and warmth. Above all, it has imagination, kicked into overdrive, on every page. Do yourself a favour and collar a copy. You won’t regret it.

Five tentacled horrors.