Point of View

Each story in Hill's collection is told by a different narrator, and as such it is difficult to discuss point of view as a constant throughout the collection; it is deployed to different effects in each narrative. However, with perhaps one exception, the stories in the collection are either narrated by a third-person narrator with limited omniscience or an unreliable first-person narrator.

The stories told using the latter point of view are "Best New Horror," "20th Century Ghost," "You Will Hear the Locust Sing," "Abraham's Boys," "The Black Phone," "In the Rundown," "Last Breath," "The Widow's Breakfast," and "Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead." In each of these cases, the third-person narrator allows the stories to maintain an element of objectivity, while the limited omniscience of the narrator keeps them grounded in one character's perspective. Generally speaking, this allows Hill to build the requisite...