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    Pop Art
    Pop Art
    Pop Art
    Ebook46 pages37 minutes

    Pop Art

    By Joe Hill

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From the New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Horns comes this e-short story—from Joe Hill’s award-winning collection 20th Century Ghosts.

    Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945. . . .

    Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town. . . .

    Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing. . . .

    John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead. . . .

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 3, 2009
    ISBN9780061845048
    Author

    Joe Hill

    Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Fireman, NOS4A2, Horns, and Heart-Shaped Box; Strange Weather, a collection of novellas; and the acclaimed story collections Full Throttle and 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of a seven-volume comic book series, Locke & Key. Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV, including NOS4A2 (AMC), Locke & Key (Netflix), In the Tall Grass (Netflix), and The Black Phone (Blumhouse).

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    Reviews for Pop Art

    4/5

    21 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The surreal tale of an inflatable boy.
    • 2/5
      It didn't come together as an actual story for me.
    • 4/5
      Surreal & beautiful. Pop with an Inflatable condition.

    Book preview

    Pop Art - Joe Hill

    Pop Art

    A Story from the Collection

    20th Century Ghosts

    Joe Hill

    To Leanora:

    WE ARE MY FAVORITE STORY

    Contents

    Begin Reading Pop Art

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    Other Books by Joe Hill

    Credits

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    POP ART

    My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about the afterlife, I don’t remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective. Talk was mostly what we did—in his condition rough-house was out of the question—and the subject of death, and what might follow it, came up more than once. I think Arthur knew he would be lucky to survive high school. When I met him, he had already almost been killed a dozen times, once for every year he had been alive. The afterlife was always on his mind; also the possible lack of one.

    When I tell you we talked, I mean only to say we communicated, argued, put each other down, built each other up. To stick to facts, I talked—Art couldn’t. He didn’t have a mouth. When he had something to say, he wrote it down. He wore a pad around his neck on a loop of twine, and carried crayons in his pocket. He turned in school papers in crayon, took tests in crayon. You can imagine the dangers a sharpened pencil would present to a four-ounce boy made of plastic and filled with air.

    I think one of the reasons we were best friends was because he was such a great listener. I needed someone to listen. My mother was gone and my father I couldn’t talk to. My mother ran away when I was three, sent my dad a rambling and confused letter from Florida, about sunspots and gamma rays and the radiation that emanates from power lines, about how the birthmark on the back of her left hand had moved up her arm and onto her shoulder. After that, a couple postcards, then nothing.

    As for my father, he suffered from migraines. In the afternoons, he sat in front of soaps in the darkened living room, wet-eyed and miserable. He hated to be bothered. You couldn’t tell him anything. It was a mistake even to try.

    Blah blah, he would say, cutting me off in mid-sentence. My head is splitting. You’re killing me here with blah blah this, blah blah that.

    But Art liked to listen, and in trade, I offered him protection. Kids were scared of me. I had a bad reputation. I owned a switchblade, and sometimes I brought it to school and let other kids see; it kept them in fear. The only thing I ever stuck it into, though, was the

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