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20th Century Ghosts

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20th Century Ghosts

By: Joe Hill
Narrated by: David Ledoux
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About this listen

Imogene is young and beautiful, kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead, the legendary ghost of the Rosebud Theater.

Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with a head full of big ideas and a gift for getting his ass kicked. It's hard to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town.

Francis is unhappy, picked on; he doesn't have a life, a hope, a chance. Francis was human once, but that's behind him now.

John Finney is in trouble. The kidnapper locked him in a basement, a place stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. With him in his subterranean cell is an antique phone, long since disconnected...but it rings at night, anyway, with calls from the dead....

Meet these and a dozen more in 20th Century Ghosts, irresistible, addictive fun showcasing a dazzling new talent.

Read by David Ledoux.

©2005 Joe Hill (P)2007 HarperCollins Publishers Anthologies Anthologies & Short Stories Fiction Horror Short Stories Scary

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All stars
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Enjoyed the collection but it did feel very random, a lot of the stories were open to your own interpretation. I do think that his work is better in a fully formed novel.

Enjoyable and random

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Lots of stories seemed to go nowhere . But the ones I liked most were truly disturbing. I liked it but it just wasn’t up to the standard I’m used to in this genre. Narrator was excellent

Not as good as previous listens

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excellent narration and the usual class writing from Joe Hill. This man's mind is wonderfully entertaining.

weird and wonderful

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Some good stories, some poor stories & a few that stop in a weird place and would be better if developed more. Below average

Mixed bag of stories

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This is Joe HIll's debut collection of fiction and is quite brilliant. Standout stories include Best New Horror, 20th Century Ghost, The Cape, Bobby Conroy Comes Back From the Dead; though many others are also good. David Ledoux does a pretty good job with the stories, which are varied, and for either newcomers to Joe Hill, or those who have read his novels but not his early short stories, then this is well worth your time and attention.

The only problem, why this isn't a full five star review, is the inclusion of incidental music between stories. It is not always between stories, something it appears n the middle of stories or sometimes not there at all. As annoying as this is, it does not ruin the experience however.

Superb!

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I absolutely love Horns, N0S4A2 and Heart shaped box, the Joe Hill novels I have listened to so far, but I dident enjoy this and I'm not even sure why really , I just couldn't help but feel the style of writing was different, this is the 2nd set of Joe Hill short stores I've tried, but I just don't feel as excited or compelled by these stories .

Not like his other (longer) Novels

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Loving this audio edition. The narrator is engaging and reads voices in differing tones that doesn't feel odd or distracting. Even female characters, which I find a good number of narrators struggle with).

Obe niggle is the incidental music. There is an instance of a convincingly creepy incidentsl, but it is placed very peculuarly. it is very rarely - if ever - applied at the srart or end of stories. it is, howevet, shoehorned between some mid-story scene change, and *always* at non-creepy moments, making you wonder if something sinister is occuring (but you'd not noticed) - but nothing sinister is happening!
I can only prsume that these are CD breaks, where the production was made for CD initially, and the incidental music was applied to onky the start and end of each CD, no matter whre the story had got to!
I wonder if this could get fixed.

Great and varied selection of short stories, engaging narrator. looking forward to Hill's first full novel.

All round great audio, but what about the music?

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I found the range of short stories and genres really fun, keeping me engaged as I tried to understand if each story would be the same as the one before it, or if it would switch things up. i did have a big issue with an aspect of the production- it uses a spooky piece of music to show a storybreak sometimes, like an extended pause, where it would make more sense to me for it to be used to signify the start of a new story. Several times I lost the thread of a story, thinking the music indicated it was over, and finishing listening for the day, only to find on my next session it was just a story break. Other times a new story would start pretty much instantly after the last, and if I wasn't paying full attention, I'd miss the title announcement for this next story, and think I'd just missed a huge timeskip or narrative shift. Some of that is user error, I admit, me not paying 100% attention, but it does seem a strange choice

Enjoyable

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I picked this up after listening to and loving NOS4A2. There is some great writing here but nothing that grabbed me in the same way the novel did. Something that maybe threw me was how many of the main characters were children in these stories. I'd have preferred more adults I guess.

That being said, it was still enjoyable.

The use of music is a bit daft and cobbled on too, but that's only a minor Setback.

Some good short stories

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A brilliant collection of spooky short stories, - basically all of which have a fascinating New Weird angle to them. Whilst Hill's dad, (who I'm also a massive fan of), is, of course, very well known for crafting a creepy tale, Hill's are more bizarre... and just as brilliant. Here we have a ghost haunting a cinema, a horror anthology editor who finds himself in a real-life horror situation, a boy who wakes to find he's become a giant insect, a killer haunted by a phone speaking with the voices of his victims and much more

Weird and Wonderful

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