The key is ghosts. The author of this book, to begin with—assuming Joe Hill is his real name—wears the name of a great 20th-century ghost. (I wonder if Joe Hill ever did thank his parents properly for fixing a legend to his brow.) The title of his first collection, 20th Century Ghosts, itself tells the reader to think twice about the plural voice of "ghosts," as there is in fact only one "actual" ghost in the book. She haunts the story called "20th Century Ghost" (2002), which is almost the title story but (cunningly) is not quite.
All this playing with words may sound a bit dandiacal and over-egging, so let me say immediately that, in the event, it does not have that effect. In the event the book itself ranks with Glenn Hirshberg's
The Two Sams (2003); it is one of the two best 21st-century collections yet published by a 21st-century author. And Hill's title, which pretty clearly stakes a claim to the effect that he meant to do whatever we discover about the book, is exactly right. Ghosts are the key to
20th Century Ghosts.
"20th Century Ghost" (2002) may be a place to start. A young woman, after dying of an aneurism in 1939 in a movie theatre at the emotional climax of
The Wizard of Oz, begins to haunt the young man who eventually comes to own the theater, which he turns into a repertory house after World War II. Everyone else she haunts for the next half century also seems to become involved in the cinema (including a somewhat ill-disguised Steven Spielberg). The story—very adroitly told—interweaves 50 years of this haunting and arousal around the protagonist's last days; by now it is the early 21st century, he is 73, his movie house is bankrupting him, he is a jackstraw ready for the flames. (It is a leitmotif of ghosts that "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past" [William Faulkner].) The climax is an epithalamium to the deep ontology burn of darkest Hollywood, and it is a liebestod.
"Spielberg" saves the day; the edifice of the theater is restored; everyone comes together for the reopening (the return); all clap hands.
The Wizard of Oz plays again on the renewed screen (too bad it's an MGM film, as the protagonist has always thought of his ghost as "very close to being a fox"). Once again, Dorothy begins her famous quintuple incantation (five words, "There's no place like home," repeated five times) and the ghost and the jackstraw embrace, and he dies (she burns him home). In his death, it becomes clear what his ensorcelled life had spelled out for us from the first: that he was a 20th-century ghost.
"20th Century Ghost" is the second tale in the volume (for the first, "Best New Horror," see below). It tells us with absolute clarity that the remaining stories in the collection are likely to focus on belatedness and the family romance (whose chambers belatedness haunts); on late 20th-century children who ensorcel the 21st-century masks they wear as "adults," who will remain jackstraws till they eat the spell and digest it and gain flesh at last, just as in so many fairy tales); on nostalgia (which relates to what happened and is lost) and desiderium (which relates to what never happened and is lost); on America; and on the holy polder of baseball, where all time stops and all the ley lines converge on Home; and on all the other baggage the young among us haul into the mercy seats of 2006.
20th Century Ghosts is a grimoire for jackstraws. It is a survival manual.
Suffering an endometriosis of the soulThere are a couple of less-good stories—stuck where most authors stick make-weights, in the middle of the book—whose mechanical iterations of Hill's nearly obsessional focus have a slightly desiccating Gresham's Law effect on the supple, adventurous, astonishingly fluent iterations of the same focus in their finer companions. Though each tale has some good moments, the omission of the Dracula story "Abraham's Boys" (2004) and of the "baseball trilogy"—"Better Than Home" (1999), "The Black Phone" (2004) and "In the Rundown" (2005)—would leave us fully open to Hill's quite extraordinary inventiveness as an expositor of obsession-ridden material.
Almost every story in
Ghosts features a child or adolescent protagonist; almost every story is told in the first person, usually by an "adult" strangulated by his past, still trapped in the twisting intimacies of the family romance, or by internal savageries of the genes that sting children to survive their parents long enough to breed, no matter how damaged they may be (several of the narrators have children of their own). Vulgarly, the narrators, and the children they camouflage under straw masks of adulthood, tend to an Asperger geekiness: They are devotees of the world around them, which is the 20th century from 1980 or so: They are tied therefore to those aspects of their world which might be deemed collectable, or countable, or saved up (just like baseball cards that iterate the Trumps, the examined life is a collectible). So the past for Hill's characters is a kind of endometriosis, a pathological aderence of once vitalizing but now mortified tissue to the inner walls of the live self. Adult human beings are ghost stories, womb death walking, endometriosis of the soul.
The stories which most clearly ring the changes on the theme of the adult who cannot abstain from the past are "You Will Hear the Locust Sing" (2004), a savage and very funny transformation of Franz Kafka's
Metamorphosis (1915) into a geek horrorshow epiphany; "The Cape" (new here), in which a toy superhero cape allows a boy to fly, but (savagely) induces in him a terrible misapprehension of the story he should be telling; and "Voluntary Committal" (2005), which transforms an expectable kind of tale—a complexly damaged younger brother builds a cardboard castle in the family basement through which he escapes into another dimension, which is probably death—into a startling fable of exogamy: The younger brother, who is perfectly and serenely sane, does in fact escape, in the way a whole man might escape Flatland (Edwin A. Abbott's
Flatland [1884] is actually cited here), while it is the narrator himself who ends locked tight in the
huis clos of a past he cannot understand, which therefore binds him.
There are three further stories of great interest. "Pop Art" (2001)—the title being a great though dreadful pun—is a word-perfect allegory without a single whiff of abstractedness from felt life. Art(hur) is an inflatable boy, hollow inside, with a skin a needle could puncture. His condition—his profound internalized exile—is perfectly described in existential terms. His punishments for being not like other boys, his melancholy, his joys, his astonishing wit, the desolation he leaves behind in the narrator when he finally pops: Everything is so perfectly told that it all seems—it is enormous praise to say this—real. But it is also an allegory, as hollow and as magically whole as Art himself, of the exile of the despised: the black; the maimed; the bullied; the visitant from another clime who walks our earth, despairing; you pick.
"My Father's Mask" (new here) may not quite entirely work. It is a "strange story," very much like one of Robert Aickman's Strange Stories, a tale in which Story (more than one story is told inside the deracinating frame of this long tale) begins at home but debouches into disintegrating fragments of pantomime and fustian. In the end of this sort of
mise en abime tale, there is no world left that any storying can catch or put a quietus to, which is a dreadful fate for the boy being told. (Aickman's protagonists tend to be middle-aged, and may well warrant a deafening incoherence of Story to mark their fate.) But the deracinations of "My Father's Mask" are perhaps excessive punishment; in any case, it is no sin to be a child. The sin is, later on in life, not to realize you still are.
Living a story about to unfoldTo end, we need to return to the point Joe Hill begins, with maybe the wisest of all his tales, "Best New Horror" (2005). It is a story whose stone gothic exorbitance reminded me of Fred Chappell's
Dagon (1968). Eddie Carroll, a horror editor, terminally bored by the jejuneness of the horror crap he has to read, comes across a submitted manuscript whose brilliance suddenly revives him. Thrillingly, every cliche that has been killing Eddie's spirit seems new-minted in this tale; it is like being born again. Eddie takes the manuscript to a horror convention, tracks down the tale's elusive author, who lives in Dagon country, up an obscure road around a bend in the world into the stone gothic heart of American belatedness. Grotesques fingering chainsaws trap him in a Bad Place house with no exit visible. But the story does not end here (for Eddie is the first of Joe Hill's cohort of protagonists who may be able to turn the key of bondage).
In the end—maybe a bit like the protagonists of Stephen King's
Cell (2006), who survive the collapse of the early 21st century partly because they have spent their lives reading people like Stephen King—Eddie guesses what is about to happen and segues sideways through the tale, escaping the Bad Place, though he soon finds himself harrowed downwards by maniacs with chainsaws through woodlands whose branches claw him, trapped again, it may be, in the kind of horror climax some writer out of the last century might have envisaged, maybe King himself, a while ago, long before he too got here.
But Eddie is too young, too wise, to stall.
He begins to get it. The terrible fix he has plunged into, the past which adheres like endometriosis to his adult life, the horror story world lockstepping him into a cliche of outcome, is a story. He still continues to plunge downward into the dark, and the golems of the stories of the past still hoot and giggle in his wake, making sounds of severing life from limb. But Eddie has felt something that maybe Joe Hill felt while writing this tale that breaks so decisively from the 20th-century ghosts he has filled
20th Century Ghosts with—"a sensation that might have been panic but felt strangely like exhilaration." It is a new note. It sounds to me like Joe Hill leaving his ghosts at last, Eddie Carroll surfing into the here and now:
He felt as if at any moment his feet might leave the ground and never come back down. He knew this forest, this darkness, this night. He knew his chances: not good. He knew what was after him. It had been after him all his life. He knew where he was—in a story about to unfold an ending. He knew how these stories went better than anyone, and if anyone could find their way out of these woods, it was him.
