20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945...Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town...Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing...John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead...

I was told this was an extraordinary collection of short stories. The reviews here and the appraisal on the cover and inside the book all say so. But this book was instead a huge dissapointment.

This isn't a collection of horror stories. Mostly... There are some at the beginning but it's more of a collection of weird stories. Period.

Most of them aren't even that much interesting. I'd compare this book to King's Skeleton Crew - mostly a collection of writing exercises that somehow got at least 20 pages long.

Of course, there are some good stories here but if I don't count the first one “Best New Horror” I had to wait for them till the end of the book.

“The Widow's Breakfast” “The Last Breath” and “Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead” are probably the best ones. But not because of their story but because of their characters. Joe Hill once again proves that if he wants to, he can create very relatable characters in both extraordinary and, as Bobby proves, also ordinary situations.

Most of the short stories weren't interesting and bored me, though.

P.S: If you're bigger insectophobic than me, feel free to skip “You Will Hear The Locusts Sing”. It's a horror version of Kafka's Metamorphosis and the toughest read I've ever experienced:)

One of the best anthologies I've read in a while.

Some of the stories didn't capture my attention like I hoped they would. I skipped quite a few because they didn't grip me in the first couple of pages. My favourite, and arguably the best of the collection, is the title story - 20th Century Ghosts, the second story in the collection - and I hoped for more like it. Hill is an amazing horror writer but some of these stories were not made to be read back to back, but more in a monthly publication. I'll stick to his longer novels in future.