20th Century Ghosts

by Joe Hill

Carroll had forgotten what it was like to come across the bread of everyday life in a short story. Most horror fiction didn’t bother with anything except rare bleeding meat.

“She’s unhappy. She died before the end of The Wizard and she’s still miserable about it. I understand. That was a good movie. I’d feel robbed too.”

Art tried to be liked—he tried to build a relationship with my father. But the things he did were misinterpreted; the statements he made were misunderstood.

the other two stayed home to watch television, scratch lottery tickets, and eat the frozen dinners they bought with their food stamps.

he was already beginning to realize he had made a mistake, allowed himself to get carried away by the fascinating possibilities of the assignment, the irresistible what if of it, and had written things too personal for him to show anyone.

Rudy was never happier than when he was making an argument, but he didn’t follow his doubts to their logical conclusion.

Max almost needed it to be true, for vampires to be real, because the other possibility—that their father was, and always had been, in the grip of a psychotic fantasy—was too awful, too overwhelming.

He was too old to play superheroes. It had happened all of a sudden, with no warning.

As I said, I was a poor, unmotivated student, but Lord of the Flies had excited me, distracted my imagination for a week or so, made me want to live barefoot and naked on an island, with my own tribe of boys to dominate and lead in savage rituals.

I was pulling Cs in Adventures in English!, a course for the world’s future janitors and air conditioner repairmen. We were the dumb kids, going nowhere, and for our stupidity, we were rewarded with all the really fun books.

What she thought of as self-reliance was really a kind of white-trash mulishness,

He had tried to pray over Gage’s body, but had not been able to remember any of the Bible, except a sentence that went Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart, and that was from the birth of Jesus and no thing to say over a dead man.

“The most terrible things happen to the best people. The kindest people. Most of the time it isn’t for any reason at all. It’s just stupid luck. If you don’t know for sure it was his fault, why make yourself feel sick thinkin it was? It’s hard enough just to lose someone that means to you, without all that.”

They had never really figured out how to talk to each other. They were always half on stage, trying to use whatever the other person said to set up the next punch line. That much, anyway, hadn’t changed.

My father was a bit of an autistic person himself, a shy, clumsy man who didn’t get out of his pajamas on weekends, and who had almost no social truck with the world whatsoever beyond my mother.