RaveUSA Today20th Century Ghosts is Hill's first collection of short stories and displays consummate skill in a variety of genres. Heredity theory would lead you to expect some horror tales, and you'd be right —’You Will Hear the Locus Sing’ (a Kafka update) is a stomach-churner, and the kidnapper story ‘Black Phone’ is grisly and suspenseful. ‘Best New Horror’ simultaneously subverts and pays tribute to horror conventions in an entertaining literary nightmare. But wait, there's more — the title tale's heartbreaking, cinematic supernatural love story; the funny, fantastic ‘Pop Art’ (an inflatable boy will touch your heart); the science-fictional ‘Voluntary Committal’, exploring a mentally ill boy's time-and-space-folding superpowers … Stylistically, Hill can ratchet up the tension or toss in a wry observation, without fanfare or showiness. Amusing, moving, horrifying — Ghosts runs the full spectrum.
