Joe Hill Day
Over the weekend, Joe Hill won this year's Crawford Award for best new fantasy writer on the strength of his debut collection 20th Century Ghosts. Today there are two excellent reviews of that book published, by John Clute at SF Weekly: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.
And by Graham Sleight at Strange Horizons:On the other hand, we could take seriously Stephen King's statement that horror may be the most important form of fiction that the moral writer can command. Supposing that there are such creatures around this late in the day, what would a moral writer's horror stories look like? What would it be like to write in this tradition so rooted in schlock and degradation, but to do it as a feeling adult? (A friend of mine, who has a track record of a couple of decades in the horror field, said she decided to stop working in it when she had her first child-when she realised, as she put it, that to write about that kind of violence against people was something she wasn't prepared to play pretend over.) Joe Hill may have asked himself similar questions; certainly placing "Best New Horror" at the start of the collection seems to me as clear a statement of intent as you could wish for.
My own full review of the book is here; I think it's a very strong collection with some outstanding stories. More people should read it.
And by Graham Sleight at Strange Horizons:On the other hand, we could take seriously Stephen King's statement that horror may be the most important form of fiction that the moral writer can command. Supposing that there are such creatures around this late in the day, what would a moral writer's horror stories look like? What would it be like to write in this tradition so rooted in schlock and degradation, but to do it as a feeling adult? (A friend of mine, who has a track record of a couple of decades in the horror field, said she decided to stop working in it when she had her first child-when she realised, as she put it, that to write about that kind of violence against people was something she wasn't prepared to play pretend over.) Joe Hill may have asked himself similar questions; certainly placing "Best New Horror" at the start of the collection seems to me as clear a statement of intent as you could wish for.
My own full review of the book is here; I think it's a very strong collection with some outstanding stories. More people should read it.