20th Century Ghosts

Joe Hill

Oct 2007 · HarperAudio · Narrated by David Ledoux

About this audiobook

From the New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Horns comes this award-winning collection of short fiction.

Imogene is young, beautiful . . . and dead, waiting in the Rosebud Theater one afternoon in 1945. . . .

Francis was human once, but now he's an eight-foot-tall locust, and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. . . .

John is locked in a basement stained with the blood of half a dozen murdered children, and an antique telephone, long since disconnected, rings at night with calls from the dead. . . .

Nolan knows but can never tell what really happened in the summer of '77, when his idiot savant younger brother built a vast cardboard fort with secret doors leading into other worlds. . . .

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. . . .

 

Ratings and reviews

I am not a literary giant...I read and listen to audio books all the time,at least 4 books per month but usually more. But...I love to read for the story first. So maybe i just don't "get it" the way an educated literary scholar would. I didn'tklie the fact that the author makes the reader write most of the endings. Don't get me all wrong...i don't mind having to think...but I'm not a writer or I'd be an author collecting the big bucks like Mr.Hill here. Most of these short stories seemed unfinished to me and left me unsatisfied and wanting. The writing was good and the ideas behind the stories were awesome but incomplete. It was like he collected all of his writings that he began but couldn't finish then decided to pretend that it was on purpose. I'm sorry Joe, I hate to write a bad review cause i really liked most of your other books! There were a fewin here that i would LOVE to see him actually finish and create an epic novel from! "Abraham's Boys","The Black Phone",and"The Cape".

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. I love Joe Hill's novels, but the short stories in this book just felt flat and unfinished to me. I also had a technical problem: at several points, the audio included a burst of static. It didn't cover the actual audio, but didn't help the overall experience.

About the author

Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Fireman, NOS4A2, Horns, and Heart-Shaped Box; Strange Weather, a collection of novellas; and the acclaimed story collections Full Throttle and 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of a seven-volume comic book series, Locke & Key. Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV, including NOS4A2 (AMC), Locke & Key (Netflix), In the Tall Grass (Netflix), and The Black Phone (Blumhouse).