• 20th Century Ghosts

  • By: Joe Hill
  • Narrated by: David LeDoux
  • Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (1,846 ratings)

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20th Century Ghosts  By  cover art

20th Century Ghosts

By: Joe Hill
Narrated by: David LeDoux
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Publisher's summary

A dazzlingly original, award-winning collection of visions and nightmares from the New York Times best-selling author of Heart-Shaped Box.

Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon on an afternoon in 1945....Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town....Francis is unhappy. He was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing....John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead.

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past.

©2005, 2007 Joe Hill (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

  • Audie Award Winner, Short Stories/Collections, 2008

"Most of the stories display the unself-conscious dash that made Hill's novel an intelligent pleasure....Not just for ghost addicts." (Kirkus Reviews)

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What listeners say about 20th Century Ghosts

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent!

Wonderful collection of short stories. Definitely worth listening to. The stories stick with you long after you finish the book.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Sophomore Attempt Failed

I talked about Heart-Shaped Box for weeks after I finished it. It was edgy, nicely paced, and overall enjoyable. I could not wait for Joe Hill's next book!

However, this collection of short stories was terrible! The only one worthy of review was "Best New Horror", the needle in the bad-story haystack.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Eh…not thrilled

My favorite was “Voluntary Committal”…I loved the overall story about a spectrum individual & all the possible gifts they have. What truly bothered me was the lack of any definitive/complete endings to the stories. Spent majority of time setting up beautiful descriptions of characters & situations so really cared about them…then abrupt ending without closure. Doing that once/twice is OK to leave to your imagination, but almost every story was like that. Liked them, just deeply disappointed…many times rewound the story sure that I missed something in the abrupt ending….sad.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Good but Frustrating at times

Maybe its just me, but i hate stories with no ending, no closure. The first story, Best New Horror. it was really great, it had me on the edge of my seat, heart pounding, chilling. And then its just over, Done. we'll never know if he gets away from the cannibals, are they cannibals? who knows.
Pop Art was fantastic, it makes you go back to your childhood, we all had that friend, an outcast who left an ever lasting impression on you, that you carried with you, long after life pulled you apart in different directions.
The Cape was my favorite, i did not see that ending coming.
i purchased this book because i loved the movie "The Black Phone", and I wanted to compare the movie to the book. And the book version is like apples to oranges. The story was very lackluster, in fact with the movie i probably wouldn't have remembered anything about the story at all.
Its not bad, but it didn't blow me away like his other book "Heart shaped box" now thats a masterpiece.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

I tried to like it…..

I loved Nos4rtu (probably spelled all wrong) and Heart shaped box. Then saw Black phone. After finding out it was written by Joe Hill, I had to check it out. Button Boy was at least sort of interesting but pretty “Clive Barker” as he says in the story. Even Black Phone was a disappointment. If I hadn’t seen the movie I wld have thought It a pathetic attempt to twist the kidnapper storyline. I’m glad this isn’t the 1st book I read or I wld have been truly turned off from Joe Hill. Thought that he’s only published due to his dad’s connections. Which I do question a bit.

Narrator was great & the voice inflections, timing and voices gave me more visuals to the book then I wld have otherwise.
Sadly I will be returning this one.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Too sophisticated for me

I have throughly enjoyed other Joe Hill works - I was curious about this collection bc it house the black phone, I wanted to know about it before watching the movie. Some of the stories in this collection were great but some left me wanting for more - to find out what happened because they ended abruptly. I didn’t finish the entire collection bc I figured it was going to be much of the same and decided to cut my loses.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Not worth it.

The performance is good but the stories are sometimes confused and choppy. You may like it but I didn’t.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Jd
  • 06-20-22

Was this book mislabeled?

If this was a movie I would have walked out. This is not horror, it is not suspense. It is a writer that has become lazy. NOS4A2 was great because it both developed characters while there was an interesting story happening. This collection is really good at developing characters but there is no story at all.
It is one thing to let the reader draw their own conclusions, but it is the utmost in laziness to do it over and over again.
In fairness I am a huge fan of his father’s writing, and he did this in some of his short stories as well, but never to the extent Hill has.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

disappointing

A few good stories at the end of the book. Most of them made no sense and ended abruptly, like there was no ending.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

if you're looking for ghosts, keep looking

I made it three stories into this anthology. Let me preface by saying I've enjoyed other Joe Hill books but this was awful. Of the three stories I completed, none invoked any feeling of horror or being spooky. All ended with me thinking "That was just bizarre." Didn't want to waste any more of my time so I returned the book to get another title.

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