Cover of 20th Century Ghosts: Stories

20th Century Ghosts: Stories

by Joe Hill

336 pages2025William MorrowISBN 9780063374935

About this book

A special trade paperback deluxe collector's edition featuring sprayed edges and a new Afterword by the author celebrating the 20th anniversary of Joe Hill's award-winning story collection, featuring "The Black Phone," basis for the major motion picture from Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions starring Ethan Hawke. Imogene is young, beautiful . . . and dead, waiting in the Rosebud Theater one afternoon in 1945. Francis was human once, but now he's an eight-foot-tall locust, and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. John is locked in a basement stained with the blood of half a dozen murdered children, and an antique telephone, long since disconnected, rings at night with calls from the dead. Nolan knows but can never tell what really happened in the summer of '77, when his younger brother built a vast cardboard fort with secret doors leading into other worlds. The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. . . . The first collection from #1 New York Times bestselling author Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts is the inventive and chilling compendium that established this award-winning, critically acclaimed author as "a major player in 21st-century fantastic fiction" (Washington Post).

Publication Details

Publisher
William Morrow
Published
2025
Pages
336
ISBN
9780063374935
Language
en

About Joe Hill

Hill is the second child of authors Stephen and Tabitha King. He grew up in Bangor, Maine. His younger brother Owen is also a writer. Hill has three sons. Hill chose to use an abbreviated form of his given name (a reference to executed labor leader Joe Hill, for whom he was named) in 1997, out of a desire to succeed based solely on his own merits instead of as the son of Stephen King. After achieving a degree of independent success, Hill publicly confirmed his identity in 2007 after an article the previous year in Variety broke his cover (although online speculation about Hill's family background had been appearing since 2005). Joe Hill is a past recipient of the Ray Bradbury Fellowship. He has also received the William L. Crawford award for best new fantasy writer in 2006, the A. E. Coppard Long Fiction Prize in 1999 for "Better Than Home" and the 2006 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella for "Voluntary Committal". His stories have appeared in a variety of magazines, such as Subterranean Magazine, Postscripts and The High Plains Literary Review, and in many anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (ed. Stephen Jones) and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (ed. Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant). Hill's first book, the limited edition collection 20th Century Ghosts published in 2005 by PS Publishing), showcases fourteen of his short stories and won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection, together with the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection and Best Short Story for "Best New Horror". In October 2007, Hill's mainstream US and UK publishers reprinted 20th Century Ghosts, without the extras published in the 2005 slipcased versions, but including one new story. Hill's first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins on February 13, 2007 and by Victor Gollancz Ltd in UK in March 2007. Simultaneous to these two editions, a limited edition of Heart-Shaped Box was also released by Subterranean P

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