20th Century Ghosts

20th Century Ghosts is a collection of 15 short stories spanning horror, dark fantasy, literary fiction, and surrealism. The stories share a preoccupation with loss, childhood vulnerability, and the thin membrane between the ordinary and the terrifying.

The collection opens with "Best New Horror," in which Eddie Carroll, the jaded editor of America's Best New Horror, receives a story called "Buttonboy: A Love Story" by Peter Kilrue, a part-time groundskeeper, that rekindles his passion for the genre. The story follows a girl who is abducted and mutilated, only to be recaptured years later by her tormentors. Carroll cannot locate Kilrue: His letters are returned and the phone is disconnected. He contacts Matthew Graham, the publisher of a horror fanzine, who provides a map to Kilrue's remote farmhouse. Carroll drives there and meets Kilrue and his brothers in a dilapidated house. While searching for his coat, he discovers a frail old woman tied naked to a bed, emaciated and surrounded by flies. Carroll flees, but his car keys are inside. He runs into the forest as a chainsaw roars behind him, recognizing with unexpected exhilaration that he is trapped inside the kind of story he has spent his career reading.

"20th Century Ghost" centers on Alec Sheldon, the aging owner of the Rosebud Theater, haunted by Imogene Gilchrist, a young woman who died of a brain hemorrhage during the first screening of The Wizard of Oz in 1939. Alec first encountered Imogene as a grieving 15-year-old after his brother's death in World War II and took a job at the theater to stay near her. Decades later, with the Rosebud failing financially, people who have seen Imogene report the same dream: the theater boarded up, a girl crying inside. Steven Greenberg, a famous filmmaker, buys and renovates the theater. On reopening night, footage captures Alec kissing a woman in blue during the final scene of The Wizard of Oz; in the next frame, he is slumped dead in his seat.

"Pop Art" follows an unnamed narrator whose best friend, Arthur Roth, is literally inflatable: a boy made of plastic and filled with air who cannot speak and communicates through crayon notes. The narrator, a tough, withdrawn child whose mother abandoned him and whose father is dismissive, protects Art from relentless bullying. Their friendship deepens around conversations about death and the afterlife. When Art is nearly killed after being trapped in a hot car, he never fully recovers. He asks the narrator to meet him at the seashore with helium balloons and explains he wants to float into the sky. The narrator lets him go, watching until Art disappears among distant gulls. Years later in college, the narrator meets and marries Ruth Goldman, an inflatable woman. When she asks what happened to Art, he says Art ran out of sky.

"You Will Hear the Locust Sing" reimagines Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis in the American Southwest. Francis Kay, an 18-year-old outcast living near a nuclear test site in Arizona, wakes transformed into a giant insect. Once humiliated by classmates for eating bugs, Francis escapes to the town dump, discovers he can fly, and returns home, where his father attacks him with a shotgun. His bladed forelegs kill both his father and his father's girlfriend. Overcome by hunger, he consumes his father's remains, then breaks into his school. He kills his only friend, Eric Hickman, first, then rampages through the halls. When the army arrives, Francis crashes through a window and takes flight, singing as he rises above the school.

"Abraham's Boys" reimagines the sons of the legendary vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. Maximilian and his younger brother Rudolf live under their father's rigid, fearful discipline. After sneaking into Abraham's forbidden study, Max discovers a photograph of a dead young woman staked through the chest, with Abraham holding a hatchet beside her. Abraham forces the boys into the basement, where he has laid out the corpse of a recently deceased neighbor, and commands them to destroy her as he would a vampire. When Abraham tries to force the terrified Rudy to behead the corpse, Max strikes his father with a mallet and drives a stake into his chest, turning Abraham's own teachings against him.

"Better Than Home" is narrated by Homer, the anxious young son of Ernie Feltz, a volatile baseball manager. Homer has compulsive drooling, hypersensitivity to sounds, and obsessive food fears. The story contrasts Homer's warm bond with his father against a disastrous outing in which Homer encounters what he believes is a dead man in a covered bridge and panics. The story closes at the empty ballpark, where father and son share peanuts and comfortable silence.

In "The Black Phone," 13-year-old John Finney is abducted by a serial child killer and locked in a soundproofed basement containing a disconnected black telephone. The phone rings. The voice on the other end belongs to one of the killer's previous victims, who instructs Finney to fill the hollow receiver with sand and use it as a weapon. When the killer murders his own brother to keep the basement secret, Finney attacks, bludgeoning him with the weighted receiver and strangling him with the phone's severed wire as the black phone rings one final time.

"In the Rundown" follows Wyatt, a young man with a reading disability fired from his video store job, who stumbles upon a woman in a parked car holding her slashed young son. Wyatt realizes the woman herself wounded the boy. He presses a makeshift compress against the child's throat and runs barefoot toward a police car, praying to be fast enough.

"The Cape" traces Eric Shooter's connection to a childhood cape that once allowed him to fly. After a failed adulthood and a deteriorating relationship with his girlfriend Angie, Eric rediscovers the cape in his mother's basement and finds it still works. He flies to Angie's window, takes her into the night sky, and drops her to her death. The story closes with Eric planning to visit his brother and offer him the cape, knowing it will not work for anyone else.

Several shorter pieces round out the collection. "Last Breath" features a doctor who operates a museum of sealed jars containing dying breaths. "Dead-Wood" is a lyrical meditation on the ghosts of trees. "The Widow's Breakfast" follows a Depression-era drifter who receives food and a dead man's clothing from a widow; her daughters, playing a funeral game, tell him he is already dressed for the part. "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead" reunites two former comedy partners on the set of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, exploring regret and second chances. "My Father's Mask" is a surreal narrative in which a boy's trip to a family lake house involves masks, playing-card antagonists, and the dreamlike dissolution of his parents' marriage.

The collection closes with "Voluntary Committal." Nolan Lerner, a college professor, writes a confession linking the disappearance of his childhood friend Eddie Prior to the later disappearance of his younger brother Morris, who has juvenile schizophrenia. Morris spent his childhood building increasingly elaborate cardboard forts in the family basement. After overhearing that Eddie had coerced Nolan into a crime, Morris lured Eddie into a massive labyrinth of painted boxes. Eddie crawled in and never came out. Decades later, after Morris is voluntarily committed to a psychiatric facility, he vanishes. Nolan discovers that Morris built another cardboard fort in the facility's basement. The story ends with Nolan considering whether to crawl inside himself, hoping he might find a window that looks out on sunflowers.