With the sun setting on the careers of horror legends Clive Barker and Stephen King, there really is a spotlight vacant in the horror genre. Everyone is waiting for a true talent to take the stage and absolutely wow us out of our seats. Jack Ketchum is great but also out of his prime, and great aspiring horror writers like Brian Keene just aren’t getting enough recognition.

Luckily, Stephen King’s son, writing under the name Joe Hill, has decided to vie for his place on the throne. With only two books under his belt — his novel Heart-Shaped Box, and his short-story collection 20th Century Ghosts — he’s already achieved major recognition, and for good reason. Hill is the best horror talent to emerge since Clive Barker.

20th Century Ghosts, as the title suggests, contains modern ghost stories. But only one story — the self-titled one, in fact — actually is a standard ghost story. Hill’s contemporary apparitions are different than simply translucent souls back to haunt us. The ghosts in these stories are normal people who simply don’t belong.

20th Century Ghosts has a basic recurring element in it, and that is the theme of being different. Hill exposes the harsh repercussions of being “special” by bringing it to the bluntest podium available: childhood. We see it in “Pop Art,” “You Will Hear the Locusts Sing,” “Abraham’s Boys,” “Better than Home,” “The Black Phone,” and so on. Each one of these stories is about a child different from the “normal group” in some sort of way. In “Pop Art,” the narrator’s friend Art is actually inflatable. And yes, “inflatable” is used quite literally, as he is seriously a blow-up doll. This is a testament to Hill’s dark imagination, and yet several stories such as “Better than Home” are not dark fantasy or genre fiction at all. They are literary works, stories that tap deep into a reservoir of childish emotion.

So basically, 20th Century Ghosts has a nice little whirlpool of horror, dark fantasy, and compared to the other stories, normal “literary” fiction. Don’t get me wrong, this is very much a horror collection. But Hill has a knack for writing in general, not just horror, and a couple of offbeat stories show he is striving to avoid being “typed” as a horror writer.  He knows the pitfalls of becoming the next William Peter Blatty.

Hill goes for the throat in his first story, “Best New Horror,” which was the 2005 Bram Stoker Award recipient for Best Long Fiction. It’s about an editor for a horror anthology receiving a controversial story in the mail and traveling to meet the author to discuss printing it in his next collection. The story is unbelievably dark, gripping, and even humorous in its ending.

“20th Century Ghost,” the story for which the collection was named, is the modern ghost story. Instead of spooky, broken-down houses or graveyards, this ghost has decided to haunt a more modernized place: the movie theatre. It wasn’t my favorite story, but it was, like the other stories, a good read.

“You Will Hear the Locusts Sing” follows, a Kafkaesque story about a child who wakes up as a giant bug. Again, Hill gives us this central theme of being different and the effects of it. Out of all the stories, “You Will Hear the Locusts Sing” is the epitome of a modern ghost story. The story surprisingly shifts towards gory and horrific elements in the later portion. Think of it as The Metamorphosis meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

After that is “Abraham’s Boys,” one of my top three favorites in this collection. It’s told through the son of Abraham, a man who hunts vampires  and the Undead. The ending of “Abraham’s Boys” is nearly as shocking as “Best New Horror”

But the most bizarre story in this collection is “My Father’s Mask.” Really, I didn’t know what to make of it when I finished reading it, and I don’t know what to make of it now. It’s a metaphorical story told through a child’s eyes as he and his parents are fleeing from people to whom they owe money. As if to escape their identities as well, they put on masks, a “black kitten mask, edged with rhinestones, and with glistening whiskers.” The mask is an obvious metaphor, but the story is still peculiar and bizarre.

20th Century Ghosts is the best horror collection to come out in years, since Stephen King’s Everything’s Eventual more than three years before. While published before Heart-Shaped Box, 20th Century Ghosts was republished and received more recognition after Hill’s bestselling novel. It solidifies him as the top aspiring horror writer.

Score: 4.8/5