A clown is abducting kids in a small town. Sound familiar? And it’s by Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill, no less! Balloons feature and, oh yeah, the main character’s sister also happens to have the Shining.
Hill’s short story The Black Phone has so many famous features of his dad’s work that it made me wonder whether this was intended to be a part of King’s shared universe - a lot of his books have become connected to one another over the years - or whether it’s a straight-up pastiche of IT. I’m pretty sure though it’s simply a bad piece of fiction by an overrated writer.
The main character, Finney, is abducted by Al the clown (I know - for no reason the two main characters are named after the actor Albert Finney) where he spends the entire story locked in a basement with a black phone that isn’t connected to anything. It’s not riveting to read to say the least as barely anything happens until the silly ending.
There’s potential here - Al could’ve been a compelling character if he had been fleshed out rather than be one-dimensional, the black phone could’ve done something more interesting than what it did - but Joe Hill doesn’t realise any of it and tells a very dreary and instantly forgettable story instead. Hill remains a dismal storyteller. I only hope the movie adaptation is nothing like the original source material.
No comments:
Post a Comment