The 2019 hot-streak of stellar short story collections continues with the latest from Joe Hill. The 13 stories collected here offer up some of the best horror and fantasy of the year and cover a wide variety of ideas and subjects. Many of these are pretty frightening, and Hill is a master at building up suspense, but it is the subtext that really makes these tales stand out. The book opens with an essay about his life growing up with Stephen King for a father, which many readers may find would be more than enough to make the book worth it on its own. 2 of the stories within (“Full Throttle” & “In the Tall Grass”) are co-written with King, and they make for some of the strongest (and scariest) in the book, though the solo tales “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain”, “Faun”, “Late Returns”, “All I Care About is You”, and “Mums” also stand out. In my mind however, the absolute best is the last one, “You Are Released”, which follows a diverse group of passengers on an airplane as a major incident begins to transpire back on the ground. There is nothing supernatural about this all-too-plausible scenario, and it just goes to show that often times the scariest stories are about humankind and not monsters. An excellent collection that should keep readers up and night both in fear and contemplation. ★★★★★ – Sean Farrell

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★★★★★ = Excellent | ★★★★ = Very Good | ★★★ = Good | ★★ = Fair | ★ = Poor