• Author: Joe Hill
• Publisher: Amazon Original
  Stories
• Publishing year: 2025
• Pages: 46 (kindle)
• ISBN: 9781662532139

Review:

Barking up the wrong tree

Jackknife is the first of five new short stories collected for Amazon Original Stories. A few years ago there was a collection of stories with creatures as antagonists, this time the stories will make you shiver!

When down-on-his-luck Dennis Lang, who is involved in a scandal with one of his students after some naughty and silly texts, finds a tree with some inscription on it and in its bark a decade old jackknife. He thinks it’s a beautiful piece and pulls it out of the tree. But by doing that he awakens a murderous force that will haunt and follow him. And just when he thought he could pick up his life again, the evil will try to destroy it all some more!

“Don’t touch!”

It’s without a doubt that Joe Hill has earned his merit as a writer and as a storyteller. His ability to write some short tales and bring on shivers on ones skin is beyond anything anyone else has ever reached, maybe apart from his father. (apple and tree, hopefully a tree without inscription or jackknife though). But somehow, and I can’t put my finger on it why, this story wasn’t completely what I expected so it didn’t truly scare me enough. It’s written in Joe Hill’s very recognizable style so no faults there and it is a shivering premises but I just couldn’t get into it as much as I did with his previous work. Nonetheless, I do recommend everything he has written. And I am very much looking forward to his new novel, King Sorrow, that will be published later this year!

And as for the ‘Shivers’ collection, the following days or weeks I will complete this collection.