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My Father's Mask. Maybe the most difficult story to decipher in this collection. It is somewhat of a family story with some bizarre and off-putting content, and it will have you questioning what is actually real. Who is really wearing the masks and why?

Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead. This is a fun story about working as zombie extras filming a George Romero movie. At its heart though, it is a relationship story with a heavy does of comedy. I like that it adds some levity to this collection.

The Widow's Breakfast. Another story that is not exactly horror, but it does evoke an atmosphere of gloominess, and I liked it quite a bit. This is a depression era story about people severely down on their luck and just doing their best to get by during hard times.

Dead-Wood. I am not sure that this even qualifies as a story, many poems are longer than this. Just a very brief folk tale about some phantom trees. I guess it was okay?

Last Breath. A brief story about a curator who is a bit off and collects some odd items for his museum.

The Cape. I suppose that you could call this a supernatural story about a guy who does not seem to be going much of anywhere in life. It is not horror, but dark from a psychological perspective. Apparently this also inspired a series of graphic novels.

In the Rundown. Interesting story. It has somewhat of a true crime aesthetic to it. I was at first a little bit unsatisfied with the ending, but it is one of those where the ending is intentionally left open, leaving the reader to ponder on the possibilities for how it will play out and who will be believed.

The Black Phone. Here it is, the story that was made into a film and expanded the popularity of this collection. A good kidnapping story with a slight supernatural twist. The story is solid, but the movie really expanded upon the source material, while managing to stay within its framework, and also made it darker and creepier. Quite interesting to read Hill's original vision for this story.

Better Than Home. A father-son relationship story, which feels a bit out of place in this collection. Not bad, but also nothing special. It does contain a good dose of baseball (Tiger Stadium was especially nostalgic for me), and there is a somewhat subtle reference to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, which I had just watched quite recently.

Abraham's Boys. This is a fun and darkly atmospheric story that takes place in times past. I am keeping it very vague because there is a certain joy in discovery while reading it.

You Will Hear the Locust Sing. This is clearly Hill's take on Kafka's The Metamorphosis. This story though, is definitely grosser and becomes very dark. I cannot say that I liked where the author went with this or what the narrative seems to say about certain topics.

Pop Art. A story about an inflatable? So strange, I am not sure that I can get behind this one.

20th Century Ghost. Nothing groundbreaking here, but a nice old theater haunting ghost story.

Best New Horror. This is a story about an editor trying to track down an author to include a story in the publication he is preparing. This probably does not sound much like horror, but...you will just have to read it.

One Rainy Day in Paris by Skip and Penny Williams. This is a time travel/time alteration story about Marie Curie, the discovery of radiation, and its weaponization. Not a particularly memorable story, but I found it pretty entertaining and interesting after a somewhat of a slow start.

Standing Still by Donald J. Bingle. This one starts as a rather implausible that I was certain would be fairly predictable and bland. However, it took some dark and surprising turns toward the end that elevated the story quite a bit. This is another time-traveling, history-altering story that has some similarities to the first story in this collection, Pierson's "Pruning the Tree."

Oyer and Terminer by Joe Masdon. This is a story set during the Salem witch trials. Honestly, it did nothing for me. Also, oddly, it had a lot of typos, which has not been the case with any of the other stories in this collection.

The Man in Cell 91 by Gene DeWeese. A condemned man is forced to experience dreams/visions with the hope that it will cause him to change his views and help to alter the course of humanity. It was okay. I was not familiar with this author, but it appears that he has written predominately Star Trek and some other shared world fiction.

Chaos Theory by Stephen Leigh. Well, this had all the makings of the beginning of amateur erotica or male fantasy. It had one main talking point, historical determinism, so I am not sure that I would even classify the story as science fiction. Pretty unmemorable.

A Better Place by Linda P. Baker. A story about the nature of treasure and the nature of people in a post-apocalyptic United States. Quite a well-realized world for a short story of only 20 pages, but I am unsure how this one really qualifies as a "time twister". Alternate history I suppose?

Parsley Sage, Rosemary, and Time by Jon L. Breen. I am not familiar with the author, but this was a fun mystery story about a group of amateur writers who hold weekly reading. Saying more than that might spoil some of the discovery of the story, so I will leave it there.

Downtown Knight by James M. Ward. This story definitely took some inspiration from Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, except with Italian mafia characters. Somewhat fun, but more than anything it felt like a showcase for some characters to go around talking like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas while the medieval knights stand around bewildered.

Voices by Jackie Cassada. Some scientists of the future find a way to go back and rescue Joan of Arc from the past and bring her to their time, so that she can help save a world that is in peril. It is an interesting concept but I was pretty disappointed with the story. It was extremely brief. A longer work would have allowed for more detail about the world's crisis and Joan's reaction to the world of the future.

The Power and the Glory by Robert E. Vardeman. An alternate history story about Nikolai Tesla and the lead up to the first world war. It started out as too much of an exercise in name-dropping of famous people from the late nineteenth century, but eventually became a story with enough depth to warrant the reading.

Mundane Lane by Kevin J. Anderson. A man from a different reality where science fiction never took hold has to time travel back to various points in history in order to "revive" the genre and thereby hopefully save the world. A bit of a self-indulgent story, but enjoyable.

Occupation Duty by Harry Turtledove. One of the few authors featured in this book with which I was already familiar. This is not what I would exactly consider a time twister, but I suppose it is an alternate history, where ancient people of the Middle East (Philistines, Moabites, etc.) are in conflict in the modern era. Perhaps more interesting if you are a scholar of ancient history.

"Pruning the Tree" by Chris Pierson. A somewhat mundane "going back in time to change history" sort of story. Not bad, but it feels like something that I, not being a writer, could come up with. There was one piece of this story that, in my opinion, could make for the basis of an interesting novel or novella, but I think that the Terminator movies have already explored that too. I do like the story title though.

A Planet Named Shayol. This is something like Smith's version of Dante's Inferno, with Shayol being a real-life version of purgatory, to which people may be banished. There they are subjected to horrors, which do have some implied benefit to humanity I suppose. It is not overly graphic, but be prepared for some very uncomfortable details.