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Strange Weather by Joe Hill is a collection of four, short, horror
novels with little to do with the actual weather and more to do with innate
fears erupting from monsters found in everyday life. Weather seems to symbolize
the over-arching theme of our worst enemy (self) which ties the four seemingly
different novels together. Our inner thoughts (fears and beliefs) are the catalyst
to the kind of weather we have to endure. Just like the weather (a snowy day is
opposite of one that is sunny) these stories are different at first glance, but
if you dig deeper, and I think Hill did, you discover real monsters are created
out of our own paranoia and fear. And it is here, we should be afraid.
In the first story, Snapshot, the fear of memory loss and
growing older plagues us in diseases -Alzheimer. This fear is embodied in a
creepy guy called the Phoenician.
“But he was feverishly ugly,
his chin sunk most of the way back into his long neck, his cheeks corroded with
old acne scars.”
“Don’t let him take a picture
of you. Don’t let him start taking things away.”
I can’t think of a scarier way
to lose my memory, but to a guy that looks like the Phoenician and steals
memories with a click of a camera. And the Phoenician’s descriptive doesn’t
stop with his physical appearance, it infiltrates his voice, actions and mean,
heartless words he often spits out at every one he encounters, especially the
narrator, a young boy named Michael, a good kid who wants to do the ‘right’
thing. The story follows a straight forward almost predictable ending, so this
is not what makes this story interesting. It is the motive behind the
Phoenician that is interesting and it is a genuinely fun read, scary, but fun.
I’m an eighties girl, so the references made me laugh out loud.
“He grinned wolfishly beneath
his Tom Selleck mustache. And – look – even the Trans Am was there.”
OMG, I remember that mustache, needing
charisma, and Magnum P.I. cheese stud. I became nostalgic over other Eighty fun
memorabilia, G.I. Joes, Artic Blu, and the Polaroid camera. Snapshot reminded me of a shorter
version of Hill’s NOS4A2, a book
about good versus evil with a little digging into what we hold as humanly
important and traditional. In Snapshot it would be sanity, memories intact and
in NOS4A2 Christmas traditions are
turned inside out distorting the complimentary reds and greens to greys, and poop
brown, turning vile and freakishly horrific. Both stories make you afraid
pulling at your inner fear and paranoia.
The second story, Loaded, focuses on our fear of guns, and
our need to embrace them out of fear. Sure, there seems to be some politics
from Hill here, but not in way that bothered me. The story pointed at not the
gun, but the monster behind the trigger. The ending is worth the read on this
one, and I couldn’t see it taking another direction considering the foreshadowing
that lead up to it.
The third story, Aloft, strange indeed, about a man
getting hijacked by a cloud while parachuting from a plane. Aubrey, the man kidnapped,
is afraid of heights, but this is not the larger fear at work in this story. Are
we not afraid of floating through life, as if on a cloud, and then later waking
up knowing we never parted our hair differently or ate the peach life presented
to us. Are we afraid of wasting so much time, there will be no time? Are we
afraid of leaping off our cloud-like home and reaching a bigger potential
within ourselves? This story may have taught me to be less afraid after reading
it.
The last story, Rain, was the results of fear and loss.
Loss was the reason for the killer rain, and fear augmented it. Once the killer rain fell, everyone began to
theorize without fact and solely based on inner fear, inevitably causing a war among
men. The ending came as unexpected until right before it was revealed. I like
being surprised. Characterization was interesting. Honeysuckle Speck was
completely flushed out in a short span of time with lines like the ones below,
and heck, I just liked her.
“One look at the strappy white
muscle shirt and the trucker haircut and you’d spot me for a bull dyke.”
Honeysuckle was true to her
name, after wearing her sexuality out with big chunks of love for her lover
Yolanda, the sweet smell of honeysuckles was left revealing real reasons to love,
an invisible force that moved Honeysuckle on her journey to live, despite the
grim circumstances the rain had left the world in. Rain could have easily been my favorite of the four stories, but I
felt it needed to be a novel. The end, although complete, needed more flushing
out. For example, the character of Ursula needed more background to play the key
role she did. It was way too interesting to just be a short novel.
Strange Weather is highly recommended to those who want a good
psychological scare by taking a look at reality.
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