Full Throttle: Stories

A semi hunts down the members of a motorcycle gang out on the open road. Children discover the remains of a strange creature on the shore of Lake Champlain. A businessman offers the rich a chance to hunt mythical creatures. A bookmobile allows the dead to keep reading. A teenager rents a robot friend on her birthday. A young man believes the mum plants growing by his mother’s grave are more than they appear.

Joe Hill is one of the most important voices in modern horror. Although some of his best stories involve high concepts and detailed, thoughtful mythologies, he’s also a wizard at finding the horror in the everyday. Full Throttle leans more toward the horror of the everyday, but that doesn’t make it any less enthralling or shiver-inducing.

A train ride. A plane ride. A ride on a carousel. A foggy lakeside. A staircase. Even tall grass on the side of the road. In the capable hands of a master storyteller, horror lurks just around the next turn, behind the door over there, and outside the window. Hill crafts immaculately unsettling tales, stories that luxuriate in the horror without ever overstaying their welcome. He knows precisely how much to show and how much to tell, and each story in this collection ratchets the tension upward in different, curious ways.

Full Throttle is the perfect intro for new readers and a great read for any horror fan, whether you’re familiar with Hill or not.