My favourite in the book, though, is the persuasively disturbing ‘My Father’s Mask’, which begins as a game told by a mother to entertain her son in the car, and is so subtly seeped in growing surreality as to make it absolutely eerie and unnerving, a real gem of a story. Nothing in this collection prepares you for anything else in it, making the reader itch with curiosity. The rise of a super-villain in ‘The Cape’. The amazingly odd ‘Pop Art’, whose narrator is best friends with an inflatable boy, a boy’s transformation into a giant cricket in ‘You Will Hear the Locusts Sing’, the clever and frightening Van-Helsing pastiche, ‘Abraham’s Boys’ and an abducted child’s otherworldly assistance in ‘The Black Phone’. Most of the stories have young men or boys as the first-person narrator, which makes sense, (the only exception I can think of is the hidden story in the acknowledgements at the beginning), but otherwise, each one is so varied as to seem to come from an entirely different part of the map of Joe Hill’s imagination. Show More writer, with hardly a dud in the collection, that he writes very sweet ghost stories and very weird fantasy, and that while I’ve read the comparisons in reviews between the author and but hardly any of Neil Gaiman – because it’s Gaiman that this collection of Hill’s reminds me of, very strongly.
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