MANILA, Philippines - Just how scary is this book? There is a frightening story hidden in the acknowledgments. No kidding.

It is just one of the many subtle terrors laced throughout ?20th Century Ghosts? by Joe Hill (Gollancz, London, 2007, 390 pages), a collection of Hill?s short fiction which has been out of print until fairly recently.

Hill scared up critical praise for his novel ?Heart-Shaped Box? as well as his comic book ?Locke & Key.? But it is in his stories where Hill?s ability to induce gooseflesh is on full display.

The stories in ?Ghosts? are mostly first-person narratives, often laced with baseball references and dripping with details of everyday American life. Not all of them are supernatural but they all deal with what haunts us.

The gruesome ?You Will Hear the Locusts Sing? is by far the most by-the-number of the stories, but it remains spooky.

The poignant ?Better Than Home? is more perplexing than creepy even as ?My Father?s Mask? is downright mystifying.

In ?Best New Horror,? the jaded editor in search of horror stories finds himself chased by real horror, yet it is not hokey or gimmicky; it feels real. The same is true for the change-of-pace that is ?In the Rundown.?

Heartbreaking

Some of the better stories in ?Ghosts? are not even frightening in the traditional sense. Hill mixes slivers of science fiction and fantasy into the mix. But what he really deals in is the dispensing of different kinds of fear as if cards from a deck: a little unease here, a bit of dread there.

What Hill finally uncovers for the reader is his unique slice of the unexpected unusual.

Thus, the coming-of-age tale ?Pop Art? is heartbreaking more than anything else.

The sudden bursts of violence in the brutal ?The Black Phone? are almost cathartic.

Wishful thinking acquires real-world solidity and a jaw-dropping twist in ?The Cape.?

The shortest piece, the one-and-half page ?Dead-wood,? is more a rumination than fiction.

The parade goes on. Truly surprising things happen during the filming of a seminal zombie movie in ?Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead.?

The building of a childhood fort leads to points unknown in the terrific ?Voluntary Committal.? It is Hill?s ability to engineer fear into the most mundane, most unexpected of pursuits that makes him so good.

In that sense, it makes abundant sense that the story the book derives its title from, the movie-mad ?20th Century Ghost,? is moody and intricate.

It?s the tale of a ghost seen again and again in a small-town movie theater, a ghost that somehow ties together lives. If ever a horror story can be immediately described as beautiful, it is this one, a nuanced tribute to the treasures found in the familiar.

Hill is the newest, most promising voice in horror, and readers should be willing to walk the wild side with him. He wanders in this nebulous wasteland between dreams and nightmares, between real and imagined, because ?anything could happen out there where the world touches the sky.?

Hill gets to that spot by being willing to make his own name and not riding on the coattails of his father, a New England storyteller named Stephen King.

Available in hardcover from National Book Store.