Strange Weather

Joe Hill once again hits a home run with this collection of four novellas, each more chilling than the last. He has a lot of help from the superstar narrators who perform the works flawlessly. Special acclaim goes to Wil Wheaton for his performance of "Snapshot," which features a villain who wields a Polaroid camera that erases memory. The most fascinating thing about the story is that the bad guy is eliminated halfway through, but the rest of the story is equally fascinating. Dennis Boutsikaris, with a street-tough delivery, handles the chores of "Aloft," a peculiar story about novice parachutists who land on a semisolid cloud instead of bulleting to Earth. Boutsikaris creates audio images of a scary fantasy reminiscent of "The Twilight Zone." Stephen Lang's reading of "Loaded," about a mall security guard who is thrust into the media spotlight of gun rights, is also a standout. Kate Mulgrew's performance of "Rain" tops off a collection well worth hearing. M.S. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

October 2, 2017
Hill (The Fireman) delivers on the “strange” in this collection of four novellas, stretching from horror to magical realism to a straight thriller. In “Snapshot,” Hill allegorizes the damage of dementia when preteen Michael must protect his elderly neighbor, Shelly, from the Polaroid Man, who takes away memories with the flash of his camera. He changes genres with “Loaded,” a drama in which gun violence draws together a local journalist who witnessed her adopted brother’s murder by a cop, an adulterous couple with a fondness for guns, and a dishonorably discharged veteran turned mall cop who suspiciously saves the day at a mall shooting. In “Aloft,” a man decides to skydive to impress the woman he loves, but a bizarre crash leaves him stranded on a cloud, where he must face the truth about what loneliness is and how desire can obscure reality. In “Rain,” crystal shards fall from the sky, killing thousands; a woman travels from Boulder to Denver in the middle of the storms to check on her girlfriend’s family, dodging comet cultists and figuring out whether this disaster is related to climate change or chemical warfare. Hill’s collection may not be as horrific as his earlier 20th-Century Ghosts, but its ideas have powerful emotional and political resonance. Agent: Laurel Choate, Choate Agency.

September 15, 2017

Horror does not need to reside in the shadows: it can be as natural as the weather, as these four short works reveal. In "Snapshot," Cupertino, CA, teen Mike crosses paths with a man who is stealing memories with a Polaroid camera, photo by photo. In Colorado, a young woman's life is irrevocably changed when gold and silver needles fall from the sky in the apocalyptic "Rain." "Aloft" sends a beginner skydiver on a cloud-borne journey. And the final story, "Loaded," revolves around a Florida mall security guard who stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero--until an approaching summer blaze forces the truth to break out and the guard to break down. Hill's tightly written prose keeps each novella moving quickly, but the author still incorporates enough details for readers to get inside his characters' minds and to respond viscerally to the events depicted. VERDICT This will be an essential instant read for Hill's (NOS4A2) fans and a solid introduction for new readers.--KC

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2017
Horrormeister Hill (The Fireman, 2016) offers a four-pack of mayhem in this sparkling collection of short novels.Think climate change is bad now? Just wait until those obsidian-sharp blades of rain cut you to pieces come the next storm. Hill, son of Stephen King, has his father's eye for those climacteric moments when the ordinary turns into the extraordinary--and the sinister to boot. In Rain, a warm Colorado day turns nasty when silver and gold needles begin to pour down. Hill's narrator, ever the helpful neighbor, watches as they rip a woman to shreds: "Her crinkly silver gown was jerked this way and that on her body, as if invisible dogs were fighting over it." Memorable but icky, that. In such circumstances, you can bet that the ordinary norms don't hold; give humans an emergency dire enough, and civil society collapses, presto! So it is in Loaded when a Florida shopping mall becomes the playground of a shooter unusual in more ways than one; what gives the story, which is altogether too probable, creepy luster is the dancing cyclonic firestorm that's heading toward the mall, which may have been what prompted the security-guard protagonist of the tale to add to the death count without the intercession of any apparent conscience. Hill squeezes in some nice pop-culture references along the way, including one to a namesake: "Finally the kid who looked like Jonah Hill had entered the shop, and the shooter, with her dying breath, had put a bullet in his fat, foolish face." Icky again--as it should be for a horror honcho. In homage to "The Illustrated Man," perhaps, in Snapshot Hill imagines an ancient mariner sort of psychopath whose Phoenician-script tats invite onlookers to run away but instead lure them in, the easier for him to tinker with their memories, while Aloft is a pitch-perfect fable that blends Ted Chiang and Aristophanes into an eerie delight. Worth waiting in line for, if you're a Hill fan. If you're not, this is the book to turn you into one.

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Starred review from August 1, 2017
Hill is back with a collection of four short novels that each showcases his talent for mining modern lives for fear. As he notes in the collection's afterword, tales of horror and fantasy thrive at a shorter length, and readers will be vigorously nodding their heads in agreement. These novellas present a foreboding and unsettling view of our world and contain complex and complicated casts of diverse characters. In Snapshot, a grown man looks back on a summer gone by when he found a Polaroid that steals rather than preserves memories; in Loaded, Hill writes his impassioned, heartbreaking, and compulsively readable response to the Sandy Hook tragedy. Aloft is a sinister fairy tale about a macabre world hiding on top of a cloud; and in the final novella, Rain, set in the present time, the apocalypse comes as showers of shiny crystal nails pelt the Earth. These tales are terrifying and compelling, filled with intense anxiety throughout, but it is that final story, set entirely in the real world, that is the most menacing of the bunch. After getting two 700-plus-page novels in a row, fans will be thrilled to take in Hill's malevolent mind through these masterfully crafted single-sitting reads reminiscent of the very best of the short works by giants of the form like King, Gaiman, and Mieville. Hill is not only maturing as a writer of relevantly chilling tales but he is also emerging as a distinct voice for our complicated times.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)