The Amazing Not-Twist-Plot-Twist of Joe Hill's "Best New Horror"

Because I can't submit this to my MFA program, I'll post it here.

As we all should know, my taste is trash. My taste is classless and over-the-top. I have bad taste and values that I pretend are ironic, but aren’t. I sincerely want to spend a night in the Pocono’s Palace and if I am blessed with being a homeowner one day, I fully intend to decorate my lawn with pink flamingos.

Sometimes I try to cosplay smart and literary. My writing is evident enough that I often try to put an introspective flare on my shameless intrigues, as a way of pretending that I’m actually quite intellectual. I’m very thankful to Joe Hill for giving me a short story that satisfies all these interests and also offers me a convenient “actually there’s a lot of from for analysis” excuse.

Anyway.

I initially wanted to submit this as an annotation but there’s another story I’d rather submit for a writeup, so I’ll just place my annotation here. Without further ado, read me trying to be smart for a few hundred words.

Joe Hill’s short story “Best New Horror” follows Eddie Carrol, an editor for a horror anthology, who becomes obsessed with tracking down an elusive, disturbing horror writer Peter Kilrue so that he can procure his story for publication. When Carrol finally finds the Kilrue in a remote house in the woods, he realizes that Kilrue and his brothers are demented killers who have trapped Carrol as their next victim. Hill excels at turning a cliche horror ending into a jaw-dropping, heart-racing plot twist all through relying on an audience's collective expectations. But while often writers deliver a twist by subverting the expectation, Hill’s story plays directly into it, shamelessly reveling in cliche horror tropes to bone-chilling, page-turning results. 

Hill lays the groundwork for this twist from the very beginning, through the in-story text that Kilrue wrote: “Buttonboy”, a short story filled with graphic descriptions of unspeakable disfiguration and body horror about a girl who is kidnapped and mutilated, escapes only to be trapped by her captors again years later. Carrol reads the story and thinks that it was the “rudest, most awful thing he’d ever read”(3) that excited exhilarating passions for horror he’d forgotten he could experience. His biggest gripe with the piece was, “the really unforgivable literary sin was the shock ending”(7.) Carrol expresses great criticism for shock endings, saying that they are “the mark of childish, commercial fiction and bad TV”(7.) While the reader might not necessarily agree with these assessments, they’re still being indoctrinated in what feels like the rules of the short story universe: titillating, lurid horror stories are cheap and good writers wouldn’t entertain them. 

The narrative moves forward as Carrol tries to find the elusive Kilrue. He learns of another distressing story Kilrue had published-a “corrosive, angry piece”(16) about a woman who gives birth to pigs, only to be “slashed…to ribbons”(16) by their tusks and eaten. Carrol thinks that the story is “written with care and psychological realism”(16) but ultimately dismisses it. His external dismissal does not make the story anymore uncomfortable to hear and the disturbing tone creates a feeling of anxiety. Carrol also learns more about Kilrue and his siblings. While backstory usually humanizes characters, these brothers feel comically dehumanized, described as grotesque in appearance and behavior: sweaty, slimy, mutilated, and obsessed with famous murders. One is even in violation of a restraining order against their mother. At one point Carrol’s ex-wife described horror fans as “sweaty little grubs who get hard over corpses”(9) and the creation of the brothers feels like a deliverance of those caricatures. 

Every bit of information delivered about the Kilrue’s feels like a warning to flee, but Carrol is enticed towards them anyway. The introduction of their remote mountain home feels like stepping into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, right down to the mailbox with “letters printed on reflective decals (that) spelled KIL U”(17.) It starts to become darkly comical, especially after he comes into the house. The house has a “smell in the air, a humid, oddly male scent….like sweat but also like pancake batter” that Carroll “immediately identified it and just as immediately decided to pretend he hadn’t noticed”(18) and a naked, tattooed, pierced brother cooking in only a jock strap cheerfully takes Carrol’s coat and announces, “Let me hang up your coat, never be seen again”(18.) Carrol can even hear the opening bars of The Addams Family in the distance and notices a swastika sewn on a table cloth. The story is reaching a fevered dream of grotesque comedy when Carrol finally comes across the most earnestly horrific image in the story: the Kilrue mother, a “frail old woman…in bed, the sheet tangled at her waist…naked…wire around her wrists, holding her arms to the headboard”(21.) She’s unable to talk, covered in her own waste and surrounded by flies. Readers see her and cannot help but immediately think of the story about the human mother murdered by her pig sons. 

Carrol realizes that Kilrue is a writer who writes what he knows; a cliche that lands so horrifyingly because the stakes feel real: Carrol is in a creaky, topsy-turvy house filled with weird, naked people chopping liver and tying their naked mothers to beds with wires. Readers, like Carroll, feel like they’ve been somehow plunged into The Hills Have Eyes. 

The story hits all the horror movie cliches as Carroll tries to escape, a fact that Carroll stays self-aware of: “he had seen it happen in a hundred horror movies”(21) he thinks as he rushes down the stairs, rushes to his car, realizing in a panic that he didn’t have his keys and his phone didn’t have service. These realizations triggers a “sob of laughter”(22), himself laughing and crying at the absurdity of it all and readers feeling like the story is winking at them. 

Hill’s ability to achieve subversion by follow-through is impressive but not surprising. The story’s climax is thrilling and successful because its sincerity is a refreshing change of pace for horror. The first half of the story spends its time criticizing over-the-top pieces that make the piece feel like an inside joke for horror fans, making the piece work on one level as a black comedy. On another level, it lavishes in its horror tropes without any embarrassment. The ending couldn’t have worked as well if the reader hadn’t been groomed to think that sensible readers wouldn’t enjoy this type of ending- or, indeed, that sensible writers would have written this story at all. When Carroll had first read “Buttonboy”, he notes that the story, for how cliche and hamfisted it was, still excited him. “It clanged that inner bell and left him vibrating”(8). Carroll’s reaction seems to predict the reader's reaction to seeing Carroll fleeing the house, excited by the lurid thrills of it all.

I’m gonna end here because I didn’t know what else to say. byeeeeeee