Thumbprint

Joe Hill is the man I read everything he writes. I'm not your normal reader I mostly read comics but I learned of joe from Locke & Key. Now I'm hooked, I'm looking forward to his next short which is called " Wolverton Station"

Really good story! I first encountered Mr. Hill when I found his comic series "Locke and Key" and I quickly realized who he is! The son of my very Favorite author, Mr. Stephen King! Since I was so taken with the story of "Locke and Key", I have since read all I can find of Joe Hill. I recommend any of his work to those who enjoy this kind of read.

Starts out well enough but just as you get interested in the plot...it ends. Just like that. I know its a short story but this felt too short and unfinished. Shame. I would have liked to see this through.

Thumbprint, from what I gathered on the first reading, is about a woman who was in the military experiencing all the grim stuff that the soldiers experience over there.

And then she returned to the states and works in a bar.

But someone has started sending her pieces of paper with inked thumbprints on them. We're talking thumbprints from chopped off thumbs and yes that gets explained in the story.

It would seem that this guy, who was also in the military, has snapped and the danger to her increases as this guy gets closer and closer.

To say more would ruin it so I won't. Though I will say that I personally would have liked just a few more pages at the end. But that's me.

But then, this is a fictional story.

I'm used to my fiction tying up all the loose threads. But then, life isn't like that. Not every problem gets put back into the box as neatly as we hope.

And while I enjoy some fiction that goes unresolved it seemed unsettling here and maybe that was Hill's intent.

Still, the style of Hill's writing works very nicely for the story ( and the type of story that it is).

Plus.... there is a chapter excerpt from April's thriller NOS4A2 and THAT has got some truly slick and imaginative writing you can chew on.

So despite my personal ( slight) misgivings about a tiny portion of Thumbprint, I recommend both Thumbprint as well as the excerpt while you count down the next six months until the full length novel, NOS4A2 is released

After all, its just 99 cents- just be sure the doors are locked tight. In fact, do that now why don't you?

I normally enjoy any graphic novel that is adapted from Joe Hill, so I was pretty disappointed after reading Thumbprint. The story follows Mallory "Mal" Grennan, a former MP back home from Iraq. She starts receiving anonymous in-addressed letters with thumbprints in the mail daily and naturally starts to become paranoid. Through flashbacks, we learn that Mal took part in numerous torture interrogations on detainees and the occasional POW abuse. First off it's hard for me to enjoy a story when the main character comes off as a cocky,cold-hearted bitch, especially in the flash back scenes. I felt the story just built and built up to something and then just deflated. There were some parts that made me question why this was even in the story and left me with unanswered questions. (Her relationship with Glenn. Were they married? Why'd she steal the ring then?)The ending too left me confused. I preferred the original version which also comes with the book. Reading the story, I sympathized with Mal more and attributed her behavior more to PTSD then to just being an emotionless jerk. The graphic novel had some noticeable differences from the original story which is a huge pet peeve of mine. Why adapt the story if you're not going to follow it?! Read "The Cape" instead.

You received a two-hundred-dollar-a-month bonus for every month you spent in the combat zone, and a part of her had relished the fact that her own life was valued so cheap. Mal would not have expected more.

But it didn’t occur to her, when she first learned she was going to Iraq, that they paid you that money for more than just the risk to your own life. It wasn’t a question of what could happen to you, but also a matter of what you might be asked to do to others. [...]

Two hundred dollars a month was what it cost to make a torturer out of her.

###

After her tour in Iraq, PFC Mallory Grennan returned to her childhood home in Hammett, New York – newly empty since the death of her father, also a war veteran, just ten hours before she set foot back on US soil. Whereas her father had saved lives as a medic, Mal denigrated them: you wouldn’t know it from the photographs, but she was part of the naked pyramid fiasco at Abu Ghraib. And that appears to be the least of it: as a cop in the army, she regularly humiliated and assaulted suspected insurgents.

Now her past has followed her home, in the form of mysterious thumbprints, blank ink standing out starkly against white paper, left in her mailbox, under her door, on her windshield. Mal’s wronged so many people, both in the Middle East and right here at home; which one of them hates her so much that he wishes her dead?

“Thumbprint” is another wonderfully creepy story from Joe Hill. The Iraqi war looms large, becoming a character of its own, and Hill teases out the disparate effects of trauma on those forced to enact and witness it (and, sometimes, those who joined up for the sheer enjoyment of it).

The story ends rather suddenly with an ominous cliffhanger ending that’s all the more frustrating for its unexpectedness: it comes at just 67% of the e-book. I know I should anticipate that a large chunk of short stories will be teasers for the author’s full-length works, but these sudden endings still catch me off guard every. single. time. (That said, if you haven’t yet read NOS4A2 – do it! It was one of my favorite new releases of 2013!)

A soldier who did terrible things in Abu Ghraib (but wasn’t caught) returns to America and tries to re-assimilate back into civilian life. But the past still haunts her and then one day someone starts leaving thumbprints on notes in her house, her car… what does it mean and could someone from those dark days in the Middle East be returning to exact vengeance?

Thumbprint is an adaptation of a Joe Hill short story (it says “novella” on the cover and though it’s never been agreed upon exactly how many pages separates a short story and a novella, 15 pages is definitely a short story), by writer Jason Ciaramela and artist Vic Malhotra. Hill’s short story is also included here, along with a weird fantasy comic called Kodiak, plotted by Hill but not written by him.

The theme of Thumbprint is how war changes people but specifically the way that the United States has conducted its War on Terror - waterboarding, Abu Ghraib, etc. - and how that has affected their own troops’ minds; but the execution lets it down.

Written in a style that wishes it were Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, Thumbprint’s hackneyed “mystery” story (you can guess who it is pretty early on) plods predictably on to an underwhelming finale, complete with a crazy murderer who’s not so crazy that he can’t tell the main character, and the audience, his plans in an extended monologue.

None of the characters seemed believable in the slightest, the killer’s motivations were idiotic, and the final panel reveal was groan-inducingly stupid - it comes off like it was written by a high school kid determined to write “cool” and “edgy” fiction, and making a chump of themselves instead. It’s the equivalent of writing “The End” and then “...?”.

Also, when you set up your main character as totally unlikeable and barely two-dimensional, there’s absolutely no reason to be rooting for them to defeat the bad guy at the end. Both characters were pretty awful people and I would’ve preferred if both had died instead of just one.

Thumbprint takes a lofty theme and fails to do it any justice, producing instead a cheesy, third-rate serial killer story. Hill’s short story goes into more detail and is slightly better, though the comic did set the bar really low, and the final addition to this book, Kodiak, feels very out of place here, set in ye olden dayes.

Even if you’re a Hill fan I can’t imagine you’d get much out of this; to everyone else, don’t bother.

Has anyone else jumped on the Joe Hill bandwagon? Ever since I read Horns and NOS4A2, I have been hooked on his writing.

Just read my reviews on those two books. Joe Hill is one of the good ones.

On the plane ride home I decided to give one of his short stories, Thumbprint, a try. It's the story of a young woman who has returned from a tour in Iraq where she did things she regrets. Odd occurrences begin to happen to her. Someone is leaving envelopes with thumbprints in her mailbox, on her door, and someone, likely the same person, has been in her house.

Thumbprint is a well-crafted mystery with a horror twist. The writing is crystal. The tension builds from sentence to sentence like an ever-growing ripple.

But the end came down with a big thud and left me wondering what I missed. Joe Hill ended the story in abstract, which sometimes works, but for me, this time, I was left wanting.

For 99 cents it's worth the read, but be warned. At the end you may be left with your mouth agape, wondering where the ending of the story has gone

[...]

I first read this short story in the 2008 Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #18, edited by Stephen Jones, and was blown away by it. It has remained in my mind as a perfect example of what a modern horror story can be. Though I forget much of what I read, I have vividly remembered this story all these years, but I could not have named the author, whom I'd never heard of at the time. I read Heart-Shaped Box some time ago, but I never put two and two together on the author until this Kindle short. I've also just read Horns. Whereas I felt the two novels had stellar writing and plot conception, they were both flawed in plot execution and fell apart for me a bit by the end. This story, though, I give five stars.

Has anyone else jumped on the Joe Hill bandwagon? Ever since I read Horns and NOS4A2, I have been hooked on his writing.

Just read my reviews on those two books. Joe Hill is one of the good ones.

On the plane ride home I decided to give one of his short stories, Thumbprint, a try. It's the story of a young woman who has returned from a tour in Iraq where she did things she regrets. Odd occurrences begin to happen to her. Someone is leaving envelopes with thumbprints in her mailbox, on her door, and someone, likely the same person, has been in her house.

Thumbprint is a well-crafted mystery with a horror twist. The writing is crystal. The tension builds from sentence to sentence like an ever-growing ripple.

But the end came down with a big thud and left me wondering what I missed. Joe Hill ended the story in abstract, which sometimes works, but for me, this time, I was left wanting.

For 99 cents it's worth the read, but be warned. At the end you may be left with your mouth agape, wondering where the ending of the story has gone

[...]

I first read this short story in the 2008 Mammoth Book of Best New Horror #18, edited by Stephen Jones, and was blown away by it. It has remained in my mind as a perfect example of what a modern horror story can be. Though I forget much of what I read, I have vividly remembered this story all these years, but I could not have named the author, whom I'd never heard of at the time. I read Heart-Shaped Box some time ago, but I never put two and two together on the author until this Kindle short. I've also just read Horns. Whereas I felt the two novels had stellar writing and plot conception, they were both flawed in plot execution and fell apart for me a bit by the end. This story, though, I give five stars.

Question for those who already read this book: I was reading "Thumbprint". I got to the part where this guy who is "stalking" her surprises her. I'm trying not to say more. As he is just about to start torturing her, and suddenly an advertisement comes up asking me to Read an excerpt from Joe Hills new book "NOS4ATU". At this point I'm a little upset because I already own NOS4ATU on this e-reader. So I go flipping through the excerpt. Then flip through the end credits for NOS4ATU. Then...there's nothing. So I try to go back to "Thumbprint". It took me 4 or 5 tries. I think "This CAN'T be the end! So I go onto the store to check the reviews to see what other people think, and if it really is the end. Everyone loved the story pretty much. Only one review said that they thought the story should be longer. So I'm guessing the story ended before the torture (?), and then they put an Ad excerpt for another book right after? I like Joe Hill's books. But this one was short and unsatisfying. Like having water thrown in your face. If the excerpt wasn't there I would have figured out sooner that the book ended abruptly. I don't really like having an excerpt from another book. So, I'm guessing, that was the end...right where she's going to get tortured? Just a warning to others: Thumbprint was is a really short story!

Was super excited that this was published as an ebook. Always wanted to read this, but it was part of a collection only available in the UK. Not horror in the classic monster under the bed, but a monster in the mirror. Love the authors short work and can't wat to read more. Also can't wait for the comic mini series based off this story.

This story is a prime example of leaving you hanging and begging for more. It felt like the first incline of a rollercoaster. You feel the intrigue of reading a story of a former military officer and her life after. As the incline begins you feel the threat and possible danger take over you. When you reach the top of the incline you meet the danger head on and prepare yourself to be scared out of your mind; then you turn the page and it's over. Thank goodness it was an ebook from the library.