Escape Hatch 061: 20th Century Man

20th Anniversary of 20th Century Ghosts; Help Yourself; LaLa Land Crime

20 X 20

My first book, 20th Century Ghosts, a collection of stories that includes “The Black Phone” and “Abraham’s Boys,” was published by a small press in Yorkshire 20 years ago this fall. I believe they printed 1,750 copies. This was the one that got my whole career started and it’s a bit hard for me to think what my life would be like today if PS Publishing had passed on it.

This summer, William Morrow is out with a trippy new edition to celebrate its 20th (almost old enough to buy a beer!). It’s got a hallucinatory new cover, a fancy sprayed edge, and a new afterword; I wrote a little thing reflecting on what happened to some of these tales after the book was released. Some of them went off and had surprising adventures.

And as they’ve done so many times in the past, my friends at Water Street Bookstore are offering signed copies, available for pre-order now. If you’re so inclined, go on and pick one up for your shelf… maybe with a side order of Sorrow?

Help Yourself

In one sense, I wouldn’t say I’ve read so much in the self-help genre. I’m the kind of guy who likes books about bad men who intend to help themselves—to money. Usually with their fists.

More seriously, I feel like every great work of fiction is self-help. Books like Between Two Fires or The Curator or Small Things Like These just naturally get a person thinking about how best to use their small allotment of hours on this planet. It is my understanding that the goal is to do as much good as I can and as little harm and that pleasures are best when they’re humble: I return again and again to the thought of the book, the cup of tea, my wife close enough to lay my head on her shoulder.

Nevertheless I have sometimes dipped into the self-help genre itself, or in books that might be described as self-help adjacent. And it seems to me, looking over the stuff I’ve written in the last five or six years, some of the thinking in those books has soaked into my own work. Which maybe means the good stuff took? Or at least that my mind is doing its best to put it to use?

If you’re curious about the books I’m talking about, I thought I’d mention a few.

A couple years back I read the really remarkable Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. I was so impressed, I read it a second time through, shortly after finishing it; I was impressed enough to name check it in “Ushers.” Four Thousand Weeks is a book written by a man who has spent much of his adult life thinking about productivity systems, and has come to the conclusion that the vast majority of them are just terrible for you: terrible for your self-image and also, hilariously, pretty unproductive!

In 2022 I became a father again to twin boys. On my first time around (I had kids when I was a kid myself and now have three adult sons), I tried to read some parenting books, but couldn’t finish any of them—they all struck me as annoyingly ideological. I wanted to know how to get my babies to sleep through the night and wasn’t much interested in whatever political points those books were trying to score. But before the twins were born, my wife and I went advice-hunting, and lucked into a book called Simplicity Parenting by Kim Payne and Lisa Ross. I have been persuaded by the book that many children—and probably many adults—are wildly overstimulated, zapped by one sensory overdose after another, and the upshot is neurosis. I think my years on social media made me especially open to this belief. If you wanna see some neurosis at work, just hang out on any social network for a while, where panic and stress seem to bubble under the surface of every conversation. There is strength in routine, predictability, simple healthy meals, and building a wall against the tyranny of too much (too many toys, too many screens, too much crap food, too much disruption). Quite by chance, a book meant to help my children thrive helped me to thrive.

How To Be Perfect by Michael Schur is the secret, very funny final season of The Good Place and does a rather good job of boiling down about twenty-five hundred years of philosophical thought into a form that can be understood by a dummy like me. Unapologetic by Francis Spufford is a fierce and fearsome argument for those values most despised by modern far-right Christians… those values actually described in the Beatitudes. (“That doesn’t work anymore,” said one anonymous evangelical. “That’s weak.”) If you like C.S. Lewis, you’ll like Spufford—the latter is, in many ways, heir to the former. Humankind by Rutger Bergman is a bracing antidote to what might be called the Trump-ian world view that life is a zero sum game… for you to succeed, someone else has to fail. It also memorably dismantles one of my favorite novels, Lord of the Flies.

But of course, ultimately, if you want the definitive last word on the subject of self-help, you’ll have to pick up…

Self-Help

The new noir out from my brother, Jesse Kellerman, and Marianna Ignazzi. It’s a little bit like if the Coen Brothers reimagined The Prince and the Pauper as a pulpy work of gonzo crime. The graphic novel lands in stores on February 25th, just a couple days after my brother’s birthday, but it’s probably safest to secure your copy right now, right here. Owen is even gonna sign it for you.

Go ahead and pick it up, we all need all the help we can get.

Let Me Up, I’ve Had Enough

Here in Hill House, we’re wrapping up a week-long party with stomach flu. I was the last to get it: I was 52 before the symptoms hit me, and I was 82 going on dead by the time they passed. Now I’m trying to catch up on all the work that didn’t get done over the last eight days, while one toddler was up-chucking in the corner, and the other was spraying the playroom floor. I better get back to it. Here’s hoping you’ve got some good reading to keep the blues at bay; I’ll be jamming myself back into your in-box before you know it.

— Joe Hill, 30 Jan 2025, Exeter, NH