Good reading forecast in Hill’s ‘Strange Weather’
Joe Hill writes in Strange Weather that the beauty of the novella is in its “all killer, no filler” length, and certainly he makes the most of that mantra in four tightly told tales.
This new collection of short novels (William Morrow; 432 pp.; eeeg out of four) by the horror author (and Stephen King ’s son) veers from the longer form of his epic novels The Fireman and NOS4A2 and harkens back to his short-story roundup, 20th Century Ghosts. The Weather quartet unleashes a perfect storm of styles, from a slow-burn thriller to ethereal sci-fi, all told with a consistently strong voice.
Snapshot opens the salvo with a creepy exploration of memory that doubles as an Alzheimer’s metaphor. The 1980s-set narrative centers on an inventive teenage boy visited by an old housekeeper who finds that pieces of her past have gone missing, leaving a sense of increasing loss.
The culprit: a mysterious man armed with a Polaroid-style camera that sucks a piece of one’s history every time it points and shoots. If the key concept doesn’t unnerve you, the abundance of dead sparrows will.
Half of the book, though, is more timely, including the work Loaded. Hill documents in timestamp fashion the streamlining story lines of key players in a mass shooting that breaks out at a Florida mall, including a jewelry-store owner and his young mistress; a trigger-happy security guard; and a journalist affected by the wrongful murder of a childhood friend by a cop.
Hill takes on police brutality and America’s passion for guns in an insightful way here, leading up to a gut punch that will stick with you as you move to the other stories.
There are hints of climate concerns and real-world geopolitical chaos in Rain, an apocalyptic chapter where Boulder, Colo., is the first city hit by a downpour of deadly silver and gold pieces.
While the rain of nails offers carnage of an Old Testament flavor, the heart of the piece is the quest of a woman who loses her girlfriend in the sinister shower to tell her lover’s father of her fate. A Twitter-happy president makes an appearance, though just as eerie are the main character’s neighbors, a cult of oddballs readying for the end of the world.
The best of the lot, however, is Aloft. Lighter and the most philosophical of the bunch, the novella stars an insecure twentysomething musician talked into skydiving thanks to a college crush. His descent is inexplicably stopped short when he lands on a cloud that isn’t actually a cloud. While getting used to this odd environment, he wrestles with past sacrifices and an existential crisis caused by being stuck thousands of feet in the air.
Hill’s Strange Weather is an intriguing companion of sorts to his father’s Different Seasons (a fourpack of novellas that birthed The Body, among others). And while there are no obvious thematic ties among his genre mash-up, Hill whips up emotional moments in all four that strike like lightning and thunderously rumble your soul.