I’m back with another review for you. This time it is a fiction publication, a collection of horror short stories to be exact, by author Joe Hill. Continue reading for my thoughts.
It’s not every day that you get to start an anthology of short fiction by reading about growing up with Stephen King as a father. This was what solidified my interest in what was about to become a wild ride.
From the Publisher:
In this masterful collection of short fiction, Joe Hill dissects timeless human struggles in thirteen relentless tales of supernatural suspense, including “In The Tall Grass,” one of two stories co-written with Stephen King and the basis for the terrifying feature film from Netflix.
A little door that opens to a world of fairy tale wonders becomes the blood-drenched stomping ground for a gang of hunters in “Faun.” A grief-stricken librarian climbs behind the wheel of an antique Bookmobile to deliver fresh reads to the dead in “Late Returns.” In “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain,” soon to be an episode on Shudder TV’s Creepshow, two young friends stumble on the corpse of a plesiosaur at the water’s edge, a discovery that forces them to confront the inescapable truth of their own mortality . . . and other horrors that lurk in the water’s shivery depths. And tension shimmers in the sweltering heat of the Nevada desert as a faceless trucker finds himself caught in a sinister dance with a tribe of motorcycle outlaws in “Throttle,” co-written with Stephen King.
Replete with shocking chillers, including two previously unpublished stories written expressly for this volume (“Mums” and “Late Returns”) and another appearing in print for the first time (“Dark Carousel”), Full Throttle is a darkly imagined odyssey through the complexities of the human psyche. Hypnotic and disquieting, it mines our tormented secrets, hidden vulnerabilities, and basest fears, and demonstrates this exceptional talent at his very best.
My Thoughts:
This collection was gripping and intelligent. From the moment I read “Who’s Your Daddy?” a nonfiction story about Stephen King, I was hooked. While only two of these are brand new stories, they are all new to me and I enjoyed them thoroughly. By far my favorites are “Dark Carousel” and “In the Tall Grass.” Both left me afraid to sleep in the dark.
All of these tales share one interesting aspect in common. The protagonists are dubious characters. There is no doubt that they’ve done something wrong at some point in the story or in their backstory, yet I identified with them all the same. Joe Hill makes you root for the bad guys. Or at least feel sorry for them.
I highly recommend this for a pre-Halloween read, but be warned. If you are a fan of the author or of his father, Stephen King, you may have read most of these stories as they have been released in another form over the last few years and are simply compiled into this particular collection.
