Full Throttle by Joe Hill
Jun. 2nd, 2025 02:22 pm
A little door that opens to a world of fairy tale wonders becomes the blood-drenched stomping ground for a gang of hunters in “Faun.” A grief-stricken librarian climbs behind the wheel of an antique Bookmobile to deliver fresh reads to the dead in “Late Returns.” In “By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain,” two young friends stumble on the corpse of a plesiosaur at the water’s edge, a discovery that forces them to confront the inescapable truth of their own mortality . . . and other horrors that lurk in the water’s shivery depths. And tension shimmers in the sweltering heat of the Nevada desert as a faceless trucker finds himself caught in a sinister dance with a tribe of motorcycle outlaws in “Throttle,” co-written with Stephen King.
I’m not normally one for short stories, but I do so enjoy Hill’s writing. And there were some in this collection that I enjoyed immensely. Throttle, which is the only story that doesn’t have a supernatural or sci-fi slant, is really quite good, but I enjoyed the stories that did wander off into strange avenues. Dark Carousel, Faun, and especially Late Return are favorites when it came to the supernatural, but it was the sci-fi story,You Are Released, that was my favorite.
Of course there were those that I didn’t care for, some not at all, mostly those whose endings were a bit too dark for me; YMMV on that.
Still, I felt the book leaned enough into the worth reading column. Maybe because many of the stories are quite long, sort of pushing out into novella territory, that I was able to overlook the stories that I wasn’t all that crazy about.

( Mount TBR 2025 Book Links 1-20 )
21. We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer
22. America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War by H.W. Brands
23. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham
24. The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
25. A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen
26. Lost and Found by Marilyn Harris
27. Strange Weather: Four Short Novels by Joe Hill
28. Three Wild Dogs by Markus Zusak
29. Full Throttle by Joe Hill
