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A review by lesserjoke
Full Throttle: Stories by Joe Hill
3.0
I don't really know what to do with this latest Joe Hill collection. My average rating over its thirteen short stories is a 3-out-of-5 stars, but the most common score that I'd give to the individual entries would be a 2. Overall, I guess it's a book that's worth picking up for the highlights, but maybe skimming or skipping much of the rest.
My favorite of the bunch is probably "Faun," a twisted look at big game hunters treating a Narnian-style fantasy world as their private reserve, but I also like the poignant humanism on display in "Late Returns" -- in which a librarian delivers books from the future to people who will die before they're written -- and "You Are Released" -- in which a jetliner's passengers and crew bear witness to a dawning nuclear war. That last title I had already read in the anthology Flight or Fright, but it's no less affecting on a reencounter here.
As for everything else, there's a lot of repetition of the basic slasher-movie plot structure, wherein a protagonist does something of dubious morality and then is punished by an apparently just universe in some horrific way. There are also plenty of homages to the author's father (including two works co-written with him, "Throttle" and "In the Tall Grass"), which successfully channel the Stephen King style but generally don't take it anywhere unexpected.
When Hill is on, he's outstanding, and he's easily produced enough quality fiction at this point in his career that it could be curated into something remarkable. But too much of his regular output is still landing inertly from my perspective.
[Content warning for miscarriage, slurs, and gruesome scenes including cannibalism.]
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My favorite of the bunch is probably "Faun," a twisted look at big game hunters treating a Narnian-style fantasy world as their private reserve, but I also like the poignant humanism on display in "Late Returns" -- in which a librarian delivers books from the future to people who will die before they're written -- and "You Are Released" -- in which a jetliner's passengers and crew bear witness to a dawning nuclear war. That last title I had already read in the anthology Flight or Fright, but it's no less affecting on a reencounter here.
As for everything else, there's a lot of repetition of the basic slasher-movie plot structure, wherein a protagonist does something of dubious morality and then is punished by an apparently just universe in some horrific way. There are also plenty of homages to the author's father (including two works co-written with him, "Throttle" and "In the Tall Grass"), which successfully channel the Stephen King style but generally don't take it anywhere unexpected.
When Hill is on, he's outstanding, and he's easily produced enough quality fiction at this point in his career that it could be curated into something remarkable. But too much of his regular output is still landing inertly from my perspective.
[Content warning for miscarriage, slurs, and gruesome scenes including cannibalism.]
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter