In "Aloft," one of the four short novels comprising Joe Hill’s new book, Strange Weather, a character finds an old four-barrel handgun that dates to when the revolver was still a new idea. That gun only has one bullet left in it, but every barrel in this collection fully loaded. Not one of these novellas needs to be excused in favor of the other three. It satisfies like a greatest hits album from your favorite band.
Joe Hill knows how to deliver a good story. Four published novels before Strange Weather, a collection of short stories, and some great graphic novels to his credit so far, he has yet to disappoint. More than just reliable, he is inventive, taking chances on premises that in other hands would almost certainly fall flat. But he pulls it off. Largely because he cares so much about his characters. He creates flawed but striving people with rich inner lives. Their goals, their frustrations, their regrets feel so real that when these people find themselves in unbelievable situations, once they come to believe it, we can’t help but believe it also.
All of these stories are dark. All of them have some unwanted clouds in the atmosphere. Three of these short novels delve deep into speculative territory. The other takes us deep into territory that is horrifyingly too easy to imagine flooding your Twitter timeline on any given day this week.
The first novella, "Snapshot," is tempting to describe as a piece of 80s childhood nostalgia. Luckily, it doesn’t lean into an E.T./Steven Spielberg vibe that anything set in the 80s with preteens feels obliged to render these days. And it isn’t even really nostalgia. The only artifact of the 80s it really leans into is the Polaroid Instant Camera. It almost needs to have an 80s setting to have a Polaroid at the center of things. Of course, this Polaroid is something more than, something other than, a normal Polaroid. And its owner is not somebody you want to cross.
Strange Weather author, Joe Hill
"Loaded" opens with a few vignettes introducing three very different groups of people and their histories with firearms. You might guess these people are going to run into each other and you’d be right. As "Loaded" plays out, you’ll see what a good person with a gun might do in a bad situation, what can happen when a bad person with a gun enters that same situation, and how just having a gun at hand can turn any situation into a bad situation. Does this story have an agenda? It doesn’t matter. Whatever your feelings about guns in American society (and I go back and forth myself), this is a story that doesn’t only seem possible, it seems likely.
"Aloft" does not seem likely. But its main character, Aubrey Griffin, does. Aubrey is the most fully realized person in the collection, and he ends up in the least likely, most fantastic circumstances. But Joe Hill handles everything right. Before Aubrey ends up in that crazy place, he is in very real plane, about to take a very real tandem dive out of that real plane, next to his very real crush of the last two years. And he is really scared. What happens when he jumps is dealt with in hard sensory terms that don’t allow for the opportunity of denial. You are right there with Aubrey. So when he lands much sooner than he expected to, there isn’t a whole lot of room for doubt.
The last story is "Rain." It opens in Boulder, Colorado, where Joe Hill spent an early year of his childhood (Important parts of his novel NOS4R2 also take place in the area). Boulder was probably a necessary setting to have so many nut jobs on the same block. It’s bad news when unsettled people find themselves in unsettling events. The rain in "Rain" is not any rain you want to get caught in. Somehow heavy shards of iron hard crystal are forming in storm clouds. The crystals absorb the water droplets, feeding their own growth. By the time it reaches the ground, and the people on the ground, it’s a real hell storm, shredding through anything unlucky enough to be caught outside. As the phenomenon seeds the skies, this just might be what rain is from now on.
Strange Weather is an excellent collection of novellas. Every story succeeds in its aims. None feel like they were forced into a length. It feels like Joe Hill knows that a good novella was always a novella. A story knows how long it needs to be to be properly told. Sometimes that’s a New Yorker sized short story, sometimes it’s a series of thousand-page epics. The novella might be the hardest one to get right because it’s an odd duck to try to publish. The temptation is there for a writer to trim down into the muscle to make it short story size or to fatten it with empty calories into a slovenly, tiresome novel no reader wants to drag to the finish line. None of these short novels succumbed. They are right where they need to be. You can read each one in a sitting and feel like it hit you just right. Each dark story punches you where you needed to be punched.
Strange Weather hits shelves on Tuesday, October 24. Just in time to give you a good dose of weird for Halloween.
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