Book Review: Full Throttle

Full Trottle, by Joe Hill

Let me start by saying the introduction to the book, in which Hill talks about having a famous father, is wonderful. Also, I liked two of the stories -- Late Returns, and You Are Released. The former is based on the idea of not wanting to die in the middle of reading a book, and involves a curious display of time travel. The latter is set on an airplane when a nuclear war breaks out. It's told from the variety of perspectives of the people on the plane, and it works well.

The rest, well -- let's just say they are the bad and the ugly of Sergio Leone's trilogy.

Usually, I enjoy Hill's writing, especially his  novels. A couple of tales in this short story collection might have been better had they been given more room to grow. And the title story, which he wrote with his father, Stephen King, has been published before.

Some of the others, though, are bad. Meandering, pointless, and, quite frankly, boring.

Take By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain, for instance. It's a tale about two children finding a dinosaur body along the waters of the lake between Vermont and New York, which takes on the legend of Champy, the lake's resident "monster." But the tale is dull, and it focuses more on the children and their siblings arguing with each other. The ending is confusing.

In the Tall Grass, which also credits King as a co-author, seems to be little more than a grotesque version of King's 1977 short story, Children of the Corn. Thumbprint had some interesting characters, but a weak story to bring them together. Mums, about a fanatical right-wing family and their son, is  more a rant against the alt-right movement to overthrow the government than anything else.

 The Devil on the Staircase pages

I liked that Hill took liberties with style and structure in two stories. One, The Devil on the Staircase, was written in a typography that resembles flights of stairs. A second, Twittering From the Circus of the Dead, is what the story implies -- a young girl's tweets from a mysterious circus in a small, isolated town. In both cases, the experimental typography and format worked better than the story.