Review: Talk about a long-distance call!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 13, 2012
I wasn't familiar with author Joe Hill's writing, so I figured this Kindle Single would be a good introduction, and it was. "The Black Phone" is one of the stories in Hill's book 20th Century Ghosts. [Note: the Amazon book description is for four different stories; only the last description that begins with "John Finney..." applies to "The Black Phone."]In the story, John Finney has been abducted by a man dubbed by the media as the Galesburg Grabber, a fiend who has already kidnapped and murdered several kids in the area. John found himself alone in a dark, cold basement that held only a toilet and--surprisingly--an old wall-type telephone that wasn't even connected. As John lost hope and despaired of his fate, he heard the old telephone ring. Was it his frightened imagination, or was someone else really on the line?I enjoyed the story very much. The storyline could have led to some explicit nastiness by the villain, but it didn't. After steadily building up tension, the story's climax was a surprise, but in the context of the story, it was a logical ending. To say anything more would be a spoiler.In a surprise twist, the author has hidden a second story, "Scheherazade's Typewriter," in the acknowledgments after "The Black Phone," so you're actually getting two stories with your download. "Scheherazade's Typewriter" was a very short but clever story that gave a new meaning to the word "ghostwriter"!