\n9780575081925
\nHardcover
\nGollancz
\n2007<\/td>\n | 9780575082946
\nPaperback
\nGollancz
\n2007<\/td>\n | 9780575083080
\nPaperback
\nGollancz
\n2008<\/td>\n | 9781399600033
\nBlack Phone tie-in Paperback
\nGollancz
\n2022<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\nInformation about edition(s):
\n<\/strong>–<\/p>\n
\nThe story starts as follows:
\n<\/strong>Best New Horror
\n<\/em>A month before his deadline, Eddie Carroll ripped open a manila envelope, and a magazine called\u00a0The True North Literary Review<\/em>\u00a0slipped out into his hands. Carroll was used to getting magazines in the mail, although most of them had titles like\u00a0Cemetery Dance<\/em>\u00a0and specialised 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.
\n
\n<\/strong>20th Century Ghost
\n<\/em>The best time to see her is when the place is almost full.
\nThere is the well-known story of the man who wanders in for a late show, and finds the vast six-hundered-seat theatre almost deserted. Halfway through the movie, he glances around and discovers her sitting next to him, in a chair that only moments before had been empty. Her witness stares at her. She turns her head and stares back. She has a nosebleed. Her eyes are wide, stricken. My head hurts, she whispers.<\/p>\nPop Art
\n<\/em>My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about afterlife, I don\u2019t remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective. Talk was mostly what we did \u2013 in his condition rough-house was out of the question \u2013 and the subject of death, and what might follow it, came up more than once. I think Arthur knew he would be lucky to survive high school. When I met him, he had already almost been killed a dozen times, once for every year he has been alive. The afterlife was always on his mind; also the possible lack of one.<\/p>\nYou Will Hear The Locust Sing
\n<\/em>Francis Kay woke from dreams that were not uneasy, but exultant, and found himself an insect. He was not surprised, had thought this might happen. Or not thought: hoped, fantasised, and if not for this precise thing, then something like it. He had believed for a while he would learn to control cockroaches by telepathy, that he would master a glistening brown-backed horde of them, and send them clattering to battle for him. Or like in that movie with Vincent Price, he would only be partly transformed, his head become the head of a fly, sprouting obscene black hairs; his bulging, faceted eyes reflecting a thousand screaming faces.<\/p>\nAbraham\u2019s Boys
\n<\/em>Maximilian searched for them in the carriage house and the cattle shed, even had a look in the spring house, although he knew almost at first glance he wouldn\u2019t find them there. Rudy wouldn\u2019t hide in a place like that, dank and chill, no windows and so no light, a place that smelled of bats. It was too much like a basement. Rudy never went in their basement back home if he could help it, was afraid the door would shut behind him, and he\u2019d find himself trapped in the suffocating dark.<\/p>\nBetter Than Home
\n<\/em>My father is on the television about to be thrown out of a game again. I can tell. Some of the fans watching at Tiger Stadium know too and they\u2019re making rude, happy noises about it. They want him to be thrown out. They\u2019re looking forward to it.<\/p>\nThe Black Phone
\n<\/em>The fat man on the other side of the road was about to drop his groceries. He had a paper bag in each arm, and was struggling to jam a key into the back door of his van. Finney sat on the front steps of Poole\u2019s Hardware, a bottle of grape soda in one hand, watching it all. The fat man was going to lose his groceries the moment he got the door open. The one in his left arm was already sliding free.<\/p>\nIn The Rundown
\n<\/em>Kensington came to work. Thursday afternoon with a piercing. Wyatt noticed because she kept lowering her head and pressing a wadded-up Kleenex to her open mouth. In a short time, the little knot of tissue paper was stained a bright red. He positioned himself at the computer terminal to her left and watched her from the corners of his eyes while he busied himself with a stack of returned videos, bleeping them back into the inventory with the scanner. The next time she lifted the Kleenex to her mouth, he caught a direct glimpse of the stainless steel pin stuck through her blood-stained tongue. It was an interesting development in the Sarah Kensington story.<\/p>\nThe Cape
\n<\/em>We were little.
\nI was the Red Bolt and I went up the dead elm in the corner of our yard to get away from my brother, who wasn\u2019t anyone, just himself. He had friends coming over and he wanted me not to exist, but I couldn\u2019t help it: I existed.
\nI had his mask and I said when his friends got there, I was going to reveal his secret identity. He said I was lunch meat, and stood below, chucking stones at me, but he threw like a girl, and I quickly climbed out of range.<\/p>\nLast Breath
\n<\/em>A family walked in for a look around, a little before noon, a man, a woman, and their son. They were the first visitors of the day \u2013 for all Alinger knew they would be the only visitors of the day, the museum was never busy \u2013 and he was free to give them the tour.
\nHe met them in the coatroom. the woman still stood with one foot out on the front steps, hesitant to come in any further. She was staring over her son\u2019s head at her husband, giving him a doubting, uneasy look. The husband frowned back at her.<\/p>\nDead-Wood
\n<\/em>It has been argued even trees may appear as ghosts. Reports of such manifestations are common in the literature of parapsychology. There is the famous white pine of West Belfry, Maine. It was chopped down in 1942, a towering fir with a whit smooth bark like none anyone had ever seen, and with pine needles the color of brushed steel. A tea house and inn was built on the hill where it had stood. A cold spot existed in a corner of the yellow dining room, a zone of penetrating chill, the exact diameter of the white pine\u2019s trunk.<\/p>\nThe Widow\u2019s Breakfast
\n<\/em>Killian left the blanket on Gage \u2013 didn\u2019t want it \u2013 and left Gage where he lay on a rise above a little creek bed somewhere in eastern Ohio. He didn\u2019t stop moving for the better part of a month after that, spent most of the summer of 1935 riding the freights north and east, as if he was still headed to see Gage\u2019s best cousin in New Hampshire. He wasn\u2019t though. Killian would never meet her now. He didn\u2019t know where he was headed.<\/p>\nMy Father\u2019s Mask
\n<\/em>On the drive to Big Cat Lake, we played a game. It was my mother\u2019s idea. It was dusk by the time we reached the state highway, and when there was no light left in the sky, except for a splash of cold, pale brilliance in the west, she told me they were looking for me.
\n\u2018They\u2019re playing-card people,\u2019 she said. \u2018Queens and kings. They\u2019re so flat they can slip themselves under doors. They\u2019ll be coming from the other direction, from the lake. Searching for us Trying to head us off. Get out of sight whenever someone comes the other way. Quick, get down. Here comes one of them now.\u2019<\/p>\nVoluntary Committal
\n<\/em>I don\u2019t know who I\u2019m writing this for, can\u2019t say who I expect to read it. Not the police, anyway. I don\u2019t know what happened to my brother, and I can\u2019t tell them where he is. Nothing I could put down here would help them find him. And anyway, this isn\u2019t really about his disappearance\u2026 although it\u00a0does<\/em>\u00a0concern a missing person, and I\u2019d be lying if I said I didn\u2019t think the two things had anything to do with each other. I have never told anyone what I know about Edward Prior, who left school one October day in 1977, and never arrived home for chili and baked potatoes with Mom.<\/p>\nBobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead
\n<\/em>Bobby didn\u2019t know her at first. She was wounded, like him. The first thirty to arrive all got wounds. Tom Savini put them on himself.
\nHer face was a silvery blue, her eyes sunken into darkened hollows, and where her right ear had been was a ragged-edged hole, a gaping place that revealed a lump of wet red bone. They sat a yard apart on the stone wall around the fountain, which was switched off. She had her pages balanced on one knee \u2013 three pages in all, stapled together \u2013 and was looking them over, was waiting with concentration. Bobby had read his while he was waiting in line tot go in to makeup.<\/p>\nThe Saved
\n<\/em>Jubal Scott and Drake Hough were at the side of the road a little before noon, holding their shovels but not putting them to any use, when the foreman Tuerney came upon them.
\n\u201cScott,\u201d he said to Jubal. \u201cYou better get on now.\u201d
\n\u201cI said I\u2019d wait till three.\u201d
\nTuerney pointed a finger straight up, at the low and overcast sky. The bottoms of the heavier looking clouds were streaked with a color like that of fresh turned earth. Here and there a little round fleck of snow dropped spiraling from above.<\/p>\nThe Black Phone: The Missing Chapter<\/em>
\nAn Introductory Note
\n\u201cThe Black Phone\u201d kept trying to spin itself out into a novel, only I wouldn\u2019t let it. I had set out to write a short story, and I meant to finish with one? Publishers think readers don\u2019t want short stories, only novels. But that isn\u2019t right. Really, what readers want is a story so intense they can\u2019t put it down, and stories like that never go on one word longer than they have to. Shirley Jackson\u2019s \u201cThe Lottery\u201d and Larry McMurtry\u2019s\u00a0Lonesome Dove\u00a0<\/em>have one thing in common, that they were both as long as necessary and no longer, and it makes no difference that one was 15 pages and another was 945.<\/p>\nScheherazade\u2019s Typewriter<\/em>
\nElena\u2019s father had gone into the basement every night, after work, for as far back as she could remember, and did not come up until he had written three pages on the humming IBM electric typewriter he had bought in college, when he still believed he would someday be a famous novelist. He had been dead for three days before his daughter heard the typewriter in the basement, at the usual time: a burst of rapid bang-bang-banging, followed by a waiting silence, filled out only by the idiot hum if the machine.<\/p>\n
\n<\/a>Other information:
\n<\/strong>\u00b7 All stories are included in later prints.
\n\u00b7 The collection was first presented to Richard Chizmar at Cemetery Dance but he forwarded it to Peter Crowther at PS Publishing in the UK because he guessed that it could be Stephen King’s son.<\/p>\nNomination(s):<\/strong>
\n\u00b7\u00a0Bradbury Fellowship
\n<\/strong>\u00b7\u00a0Bram Stocker Award for Best Fiction Collection
\n\u00b7\u00a0British Fantasy Award for Best Collection
\n\u00b7\u00a0British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story for \u2018Best New Horror\u2019<\/p>\nMovie:
\n<\/strong>\u00b7 Pop Art<\/a>
\n\u00b7 Abraham’s Boys<\/a>
\n\u00b7 The Black Phone<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"20th Century Ghosts\u00a0is Joe’s\u00a0first published book-length work. A collection of\u00a0short stories, it was first published in October 2005 in the United Kingdom and released in October 2007 in the United States. Author(s):\u00a0Joe Hill First release:\u00a02008 Shorts collection: Yes Dedication:\u00a0\u2018To Leanora: We are my favorite story\u2019 Nomination(s): Yes Movie: Yes Story titles: \u2022 Best New Horror […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2844,"parent":13,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-16","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5637,"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/16\/revisions\/5637"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |
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20th Century Ghosts\u00a0is Joe’s\u00a0first published book-length work. A collection of\u00a0short stories, it was first published in October 2005 in the United Kingdom and released in October 2007 in the United States.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/joehill.nl\/TheCollection\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/b20th_ARC-134x200.jpg\")
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