HEART-SHAPED BOX
Joe Hill
William Morrow
Horror
ISBN-10: 0061147931
ISBN-13: 9780061147937

• Read an Excerpt

Horror is back! It never really went away, but once more we're starting to see some mainstream attention being paid to the genre. Last year, Alexandra Sokoloff's THE HARROWING brought renewed hope to fans of horror fiction, and now we have HEART-SHAPED BOX, Joe Hill's debut novel. Hill has achieved some notoriety in the short-story field thanks to a collection he published abroad called 20th CENTURY GHOSTS. But none of that will prepare you for this work, which transcends the horror genre even as it scares the heck out of you.

Rock superstar Judas Coyne (nice play on words there) is in the twilight of a brilliant career, living a somewhat jaded existence that is intermittently and temporarily relieved by his mementos of lost souls. He has quite an interesting collection --- a witch's confession, a gently used noose and some other dreadfuls --- and more money than God. When he receives an email solicitation to participate in an Internet auction on a ghost, he jumps at the chance and, of course, winds up buying it. It's not a particularly engaging concept when initially summarized, but just wait. You'll be hooked by page two anyway!

Coyne is quite an interesting character, with or without a haunt in the closet. He's an emotional abuser, aloof and full of contempt and anger, and seemingly unable to form a relationship with any woman more than half his age. Difficult childhood notwithstanding, his only redeeming social value is that he is extremely fond of Bon and Angus, his German Shepherds. But the ghost he has purchased, and to which he is now irrevocably linked, is much worse than he is, and has a major mad-on for him.

A great deal of the story consists of Coyne and his girlfriend Marybeth --- code-named Georgia in Coyne-speak --- trying to shake off the ghost, with terrifying and unsuccessful results as they race from his home in New York, down to the ghost's origins in Florida's backwoods panhandle. Along the way, it is amazing how Hill --- even as he is terrifying his reader --- slowly transforms his protagonist into something bearing the resemblance of a likable guy, ultimately succeeding in a vignette that is simultaneously frightening and heart-rending.

Rest assured, however, HEART-SHAPED BOX contains much more of the former than the latter. There is one point in the narrative in which Coyne, on the run from the spirit even as he tracks it to its source, checks his home voicemail. I noticed, at about the third message, that I was rocking forward and backward in my chair. If an author's prose sets off automatic tremors in me at this late point in my life, then the author is getting the job done. And Hill does just that, in spades. By the time Coyne confronts his ghost --- actually his ghosts of past and present --- you'll be exhausted. And maybe in love with a Goth woman, too, but that is a whole other side to the novel that you'll have to discover on your own.

HEART-SHAPED BOX is one of those rare works that is career- and genre-defining, all by its lonesome. If Hill never writes another book --- though I have the feeling he will --- he'll be remembered forever for this one. All hail the new King.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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