Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King. And he, like his father, writes. I've made my admiration for the writing ability of his dad apparent. I think King has a masterful way of putting words together. I also think his son would very much like to be his father, but he's just not.
It reminds me of watching Anthony Dorsett struggle through college and the NFL. You knew the pedigree, there were times where you could see brief flashes of the things that made his dad Tony great, but in the end he wasn't on the same level. It didn't mean he was terrible, but he was just nothing special.
Joe Hill is like that. When I read one of his works, I catch a sentence or two here and there that reminds me that he is the son of King. But the rest of it is a real struggle for me to get through. It lacks the flow and the storytelling prowess of his dad's writings. Writing should have a natural feel. It should drag you into the narrative and make you forget you're reading at all.
When I read a King book, his way of describing people and scenes is so effective for me that I have concrete visual perception. I can see them in my mind. (This is why his books don't translate as well to film for me. Hollywood can't get the casting to match my mental picture). Hill's efforts don't reach that level. He's so clumsy with the phrasing that I never get lost in the story.
For political reasons, I was done with King and his family, but for Christmas I was gifted a book of Hill's short stories in a book titled Full Throttle. It was a chore hacking my way through the book. I can read 1500 pages of King in two or three days. It took me nearly three weeks to slog through this 500 page effort. Reading it, I felt like Hill was straining so hard to show that he was a writer that he missed telling the story, giving me a reason to invest in the characters or setting a scene.
The book consists of a series of short stories he wrote over the last 15 years are so. Some are, frankly, terrible. I think a lot of myself and I definitely think I've got better stories in me than about half the ones I read here. I think I could do a better job with the concept. Wolverton Station would have been infinitely better in my hands.
A few weren't too bad. I liked the Lake Champlain one fairly well, but it still fell short.
My biggest complaint? The rabidly liberal Hill, following in the footsteps of his rabidly liberal father absolutely could not refrain from taking shots at conservatives, Trump and Trump supporters in several of the stories. In every case, people who supported Trump or conservative American values were portrayed as ignorant, uneducated, crass and boorish.
The final story in his book is a Hillary/Maxine/Schiff-level masturbatory fantasy of how Trump leads America into a nuclear confrontation with North Korea and Russia which brings about the end of the world. In that story, the lone conservative is presented as a beer swilling rube who hates them Jews and all them Orientals.
In the end credits of his book he fondly remembers when his family fled America and relocated to England because his father hated Richard Nixon.
So in the end, Joe? I wish you and your fuckhead father had stayed in England. Fuck you. Fuck him. Shut the fuck up. If the price for never having to hear the lunatic ranting from you and your father was that I'd never have read any of his books or yours? As much as it pains me, that's a trade I'd make.
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