The Two Sams: Ghost Stories [Paperback]

Glen Hirshberg (Author), Ramsey Campbell (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2004

With this unique collection, acclaimed author Glen Hirshberg breathes new life into an age-old literary tradition. In the title story a husband struggles with the grief and confusion of losing two children, and forms an odd bond with the infant spectrals that visit him in the night. “Dancing Men” depicts one of the creepiest rites of passage in recent memory when a boy visits his deranged grandfather in the New Mexico desert. “Struwwelpeter” introduces us to a brilliant, treacherous adolescent whose violent tendencies and reckless mischief reach a sinister pinnacle as Halloween descends on a rundown Pacific Northwest fishing village. Tormented by his guilty conscience, a young man plumbs the depths of atonement as he and his favorite cousin commune with the almighty Hawaiian surf in “Shipwreck Beach.” In “Mr. Dark’s Carnival,” a college professor confronts his own dark places in the form of a mysterious haunted house steeped in the folklore of grisly badlands justice.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"We go where our ghosts lead us." So says the narrator of a story in Hirshberg's luminous new collection of weird tales in which ghosts assume the shape of unaddressed emotional needs and denied fears, and the avenues characters follow them down end in haunting self-discovery. In "Mr. Dark's Carnival," a history professor's visit to a fabled Halloween funhouse turns eerie when the pranks get personal and push him to an unsettling revelation. The book's best selection, "Dancing Men," is an enigmatic but emotionally resonant tale wherein the horrors of the Holocaust achieve a tangible presence that haunts successive generations descended from a concentration camp survivor. Hirshberg (The Snowman's Children) shows uncommon talent for insinuating the supernatural into scenarios grounded in credible reality and for maintaining ambiguity until the moment of prime emotional impact. This is nowhere more evident than in the poignant title story, in which a man awakens from sleep to fulfill paternal obligations to an apparently needy child. Struck from the mold of classic ghost fiction and filled with emotionally charged symbols and set pieces, these exceptional and accomplished stories will put readers in mind of the electrifying short fiction of Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell and other writers who represent the best of modern literary weird fiction.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Hirshberg says these five are ghost stories, and horror ace Ramsey Campbell, who contributes an introduction, and anthologists Stephen Jones and Ellen Datlow think Hirshberg is the emerging master of the form. But Hirshberg isn't in the mold of ghost-story masters M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood, let alone genre droppers-in Henry James and Charles Dickens. His stories instead resemble Peter Straub's ghost tales, concerned more with psychology and history than with things that go bump in the night. If Straub can write rings around Hirshberg, that hardly means the newcomer isn't worth reading. Just don't expect many chills. Instead enjoy the friendship of precocious 12-year-olds in "Struwwelpeter," which very obliquely presages an all-too-natural near-future horror; the discovery of what haunts the northern plains in the modern Halloween tale "Mr. Dark's Carnival"; how the private, unannounced conceit of being haunted assuages a grieving would-be father in the title story; and how other hauntings destroy an old Jew in "Dancing Men" and a wayward surfer in "Shipwreck Beach." Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (October 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786714581
• ISBN-13: 978-0786714582
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #506,831 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Literary Masterpieces, October 29, 2003

By 

Marianne Fulmont (Tampa, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Two Sams: Ghost Stories (Hardcover)

Don't let the terms "horror" and "ghost" send you running. I'm not big on the generic King-style stories, but I was turned on to checking out THE TWO SAMS after a friend suggested I read it as a challenge. She was right. There is so much more here than meets the eye.

Each story is a thought-provoking literary journey. And the general ideas/plots were realistic enough that I didn't find myself rolling my eyes. My favorite gem was the title story about a man who after losing two unborn children himself, watches after a parentless child - both moving/touching and haunting. And "Dancing Men" brings the holocaust to life as the reader watches it being passed down from generation to generation.

Not only is this one of the best collection of ghost stories I have ever read, but I have to wonder if Glen Hirshberg has created a whole new genre: literary horror. It really stuck with me. I think I'll read them all again.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Literary horror of the highest order, October 8, 2004

By 

Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Two Sams: Ghost Stories (Paperback)

The five novellas that make up The Two Sams are billed as ghost stories, but I would describe them more as haunting pieces of fiction, which is not necessarily the same thing. Glen Hirshberg has a wonderful writing style, one that has already earned him many award nominations in his young career. It's a mix of the classic and the modern, a sort of Henry James meets Ramsey Campbell, and in fact Campbell supplies the meritorious introduction to this collection. What you get here is the highest literary form of the dark tale.

There is a great deal of variety between the five long short stories collected here, but they all share a wonderful atmosphere and the underpinnings of well-constructed tales. They are not traditional ghost stories; indeed, they could best be described as psychological horror pieces that remind us once again that the most frightening ghosts are sometimes the ones inside our own heads.

The title story is the shortest and my least favorite of the bunch. It revolves around a father trying to deal with the history of two miscarried pregnancies as his wife's third pregnancy enters its final stages. Who can say what kind of connection a father might have to his children who were not to be? "Dancing Men" seems to garner the most critical acclaim among these stories, but this tale of a boy's very strange rite of passage, one linking the horrors his grandfather suffered in the Holocaust with Native American rituals, didn't evoke the same type of feelings the other stories evoked in me. "Shipwreck Beach" is an interesting story set just off the coast of a Hawaiian island. A young lady has come to see her cousin and friend for the first time since he got out of jail and moved to the islands. Her cousin has something to show her, a mysterious boat that sort of just appeared and cannot be sunk just off the coast. The most interesting aspect of this tale is the story that evolves from the young man's history, the mysterious culmination of which comes onboard the strangely otherworldly boat.

If you are looking for real scares, I would direct your attention to "Struwwelpter" and "Mr. Dark's Carnival." The first story is rather a strange one involving a youth's fascination with a mysterious old man's house and gardens, especially a bell that can reportedly raise the dead. The exploration of the house produces some potentially scary moments for the reader, and the story takes a strange and in some ways much more disturbing turn at the very end.

"Mr. Dark's Carnival" is, in my opinion, the best story by far in this collection. It is set in a college Montana town famous for its Halloween celebrations, much of the collective enthusiasm bound up in the local legend of a strange carnival of undisclosed horrors going back many years. The protagonist is a college professor who delights in teaching this local tradition to his students, and for years he has sought the opportunity to visit this ultimate Halloween haunted house experience -- if it actually exists. You have to be invited to the undisclosed location, and this year he receives what might be a genuine ticket to the supposedly legendary festivities. The whole atmosphere of the story is teeming with spooky potential, the experience as it is happening is fully capable of raising a few hairs on the back of your neck, and the ending hits you like a punch in the guts. I have to say, in all honesty, "Mr. Dark's Carnival" is one of the most impressive horror stories I have read in a long time.

If you have your doubts about the continued honing of the darker crafts of writing in this modern age, you will be especially pleased to sample the impressive wares of Glen Hirshberg. This guy is, as they say, going places -- and he is taking a deep sense of the rich history of the horror genre along with him.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scary Food For Thought, February 8, 2004

By 

Murabma (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Two Sams: Ghost Stories (Hardcover)

Some eerily good writing on both a micro and macro level will keep you thinking about these stories for days after you read them (Dancing Men, in particular, gave me a chill up the spine for about a week, with its incredibly vivid last image)--what more can I say, but this is a brilliant work by an up and coming young writer in this genre. I think that you'll enjoy it greatly.