Strange Weather

I really don’t know what it is with me and Stephen King. Despite having spent thousands of words trashing the guy’s work over the years, I’m still occasionally seized by an irresistible urge to drop everything else I’m reading and crack open a King novel or short story collection. I have a Kindle full of unread sale purchases and a wishlist from here to the moon, but roughly three times a year the neurons in my brain align in a specific configuration, and then it’s King time.

For this December’s January’s edition of the Stephen King Power Hour I decided to branch out and check out something from King’s son, Joe Hill. My prior sampling of Hill’s work gave me the impression that as a writer he’s nearly identical to his father save for one exception, which is that Stephen King occasionally writes good material. Will the novellas collected in Strange Weather change my mind about that? 

No, not really.

Snapshot

The first story takes place during the narrator’s childhood, recounting a terrifying episode where he ran afoul of a man with a polaroid camera that steals people’s memories. When he realizes that the polaroid man is behind the rapid mental decline of his former babysitter, our twelve year old hero has to overcome his fear to try to save her.

This is probably the best story in the collection, taking what feels like it’s going to be a drawn-out mystery yarn and condensing it into a tight, atmospheric horror piece. I can absolutely see how Stephen King would have blown this premise out into one of his eight-hundred-page bricks with seventy POV characters and an unnecessarily detailed description of an entire town, so Hill doing the opposite is a neat inversion.

That said, it stumbles badly at the end, sailing past multiple natural stopping points to get into the same sort of hokey sentimentality that plagues King’s work. The apple has truly not fallen far from the tree in this regard. I was also taken aback by the polaroid man, who looks and acts like a Batman villain in a way that really doesn’t mesh with the tone of the rest of the story (this seems to be a recurring issue with Hill’s work; even the protagonist’s absent mother in this story is a similarly cartoonish figure who feels like she belongs in a light-hearted middle grade novel instead of a horror story ostensibly aimed at adults).

So overall it’s pretty good, not fantastic. Up until the treacly ending It reads kind of like a darker and edgier Goosebumps book, so it might appeal to former fans of RL Stine.

Loaded

This one is so bad that I didn’t even finish it. It’s a timely examination of racism, poverty and gun crime in America, written by Joe Hill, son of a multi-millionaire, and is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from that description.

I’m not someone who insists that people should never ever write about minority groups they’re not a part of. I think it’s philosophically possible that a rich white dude could both tell a good story and have something interesting to say about racism and class in America, just like it’s possible that one person could win the lottery five times in a row. It could happen. This isn’t it happening, though.

Highlights include Hill copying his father’s frequent and lamentable attempts at rendering “black” speech on the page; he actually does this with any accent that isn’t standard white American, to consistently cringey results (there’s an Afrikaneer guy in Snapshot who talks like he’s gargling marbles all the time), but it’s the most alarming here. 

Every single character that I encountered before I bailed on the story is a paper-thin stereotype. Poor urban black people trying to catch a break, the meat-headed cops who persecute them, the racist white people living in trailer parks–none of them feel like real people. It goes beyond hack writing and starts to feel like Hill is incapable of putting himself into the perspective of anyone who isn’t him, which is kind of a devastating flaw for a writer to have.

The whole thing reminded me irresistibly of the movie Crash, in that I strongly get the feeling that Hill had phrases like “voice of a generation” and “our current moment” in his head while writing it, but it misses the mark by such a wide margin that it goes past being offensive and just becomes embarrassing. 

(Apparently the story shifts gears into being about gun control and Islamophobia, two topics that I have zero faith in Hill handling with any intelligence or nuance)

Aloft

A dude going skydiving for the first time ends up stranded in the sky when he lands on something that looks like a cloud, but is very much not a cloud. A nice simple premise, and a neat spin on the survival story as our hero has to find ways to secure food and water.

I don’t have much to say about this one, except that it does run into some tonal dissonance when comparing the gruesome violence of the skydiving injuries to the somewhat fairytale-esque environment of the cloud. Maybe that was deliberate, but it still feels odd to go from a skydiving instructor snapping his pelvis in half to the protagonist conjuring up cute cloud furniture for himself.

Rain

The story the collection was presumably named for. An American town is devastated by a sudden storm of deadly glass shards, but the survivors realize that their trials have only started when it becomes apparent that the phenomenon is rapidly spreading and will soon replace normal rainfall all over the world. 

This is a frustrating one. On the one hand, I’m a sucker for a novel apocalypse story and this is a unique premise that Hill has a fun time thinking through the logistics of in terms of how people suddenly deal with rainfall turning into a mortal threat. The shards themselves make for a gruesome spectacle, and the story has an effective atmosphere of doom as the rain gets worse the further it spreads, eventually obliterating entire towns and cities.

The problem is Hill’s decision to turn the story into a sort of detective yarn about our protagonist tracking down the source of the shards and hopefully putting a stop to them. I would have much preferred if the phenomenon’s cause was left unexplained and the story simply focused on how people deal with it, but okay, that’s not the story we got. 

However, the mystery plot is also just not terribly interesting. The main character leaves her home to track down a friend who may be dead, figures out that he was murdered and quickly solves the murder, then comes back to her hometown and more or less immediately works out the origin of the shards. The bits where she’s just wandering through the devastated urban landscape and witnessing how people are reacting to it are universally more interesting than the mystery-solving business. I never thought I’d be arguing that a story should have less plot, but here we are.

It doesn’t help that we get extremely goofy shit like UFO cultists attacking the main character with astrolabes (seriously), or a comedy bit where an escaped prisoner takes her on a joyride in a tractor. To go back to what I said about Aloft, this is all a bit discordant when set next to ten-year-old children getting shredded by glass rainfall.

The characters are also once again cartoonish stereotypes: the angry butch lesbian who’s our heroine, the homophobic Christian she encounters, the Russian guy who is a Russian guy, the modern-day cowboy sheriff who “yellow-bellies and equivicators instinctively fear” whatever the fuck that means…none of them feel at all like real people.

To round it all off, the story is stuffed full of that particular brand of American liberal preachiness, which I find unbearable even when it’s being used to express views I wholeheartedly agree with. I didn’t think anyone could come up with a depiction of Donald Trump that’s too over the top to be believable, but somehow Joe Hill has managed it, the absolute madlad.

Conclusion

That’s two good–but not great–stories, one missed opportunity and one absolute disaster zone. I guess that’s not too bad as far as novella collections go, but it doesn’t stand up well compared to King’s Different Seasons which is wall-to-wall bangers.

I find myself reacting to Joe Hill much the same way as I do to his father, which is to say that I want to grab him by the lapels and beg him to please, for the love of god, stop posting cringe. However in the case of the elder King this is motivated by a sincere belief that he’s a talented storyteller who could be putting out higher quality material much more consistently if he could be persuaded to give up the bad habits and idiosyncrasies that plague his work. In the case of Joe Hill, I’m not so sure that’s the case.