Earlier this year, Joe Hill exploded onto the publishing scene with his debut novel, “Heart-Shaped Box,” about a merciless ghost and an aging rock musician.

The novel itself, an instant best-seller, has plenty of suspense for many readers. But another mystery soon was solved shortly after its publication.

You see, writing runs in Hill’s blood, as the elder son of authors Stephen and Tabitha King. But for the past decade, Joseph Hillstrom King has been (professionally) Joe Hill, as the fledgling novelist was unwilling to coast on his father’s reputation.

The success of “Heart-Shaped Box” aside, Hill didn’t earn his name in horror fiction overnight. Rather it was a collection of short stories, “20th Century Ghosts,” published in 2005 by a small specialty house in England, that was his breakthrough. The stories within it earned Hill two Bram Stoker Awards, a World Fantasy Award and an International Horror Guild Award.

Hill’s protagonists are a series of outsiders, many of whom are seeking their own way in the world. In “20th Century Ghosts,” finally published in the United States, characters shine through.

In the title story, an aging art-film house operator obsesses over the ghost of a young female patron that has haunted the theater for years.

“You Will Hear the Locust Sing” smacks of 1950s science fiction, set against the backdrop of “the bomb,” as an isolated youth evolves into something dangerous and powerful, which he has always dreamed of being.

“The Black Phone” tells of how a kidnapped boy escapes from a pedophile with the help of those dead boys who had been held in that basement room before.

“Bobby Conroy Comes Back from the Dead,” new in the American edition, is about a relationship rekindled on the film set of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead.”

The collection ends with “Voluntary Committal,” a novella about a man haunted by the ghost of his long-missing brother, an idiot savant.

Like the best works of genre fiction, Hill writes about people, first and foremost, set against a backdrop that’s out of the ordinary. His characters escape from their humdrum lives, and Hill succeeds in taking readers along for the ride as well.

Joe Hill will read from and sign copies of “20th Century Ghosts” at 7 tonight at Borders in Bangor.