Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill
It's clear that I have trouble remembering to post on Mondays. What can I say? I have the Monday blues.
I write horror stories for reasons I can’t fathom, but I don’t read horror as much as I should, so I decided to pick up this debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, because of all the buzz it got when it was published. Plus, I have a thing about ghosts. This novel scared the crap out of me. It follows an aging rock star, Judas Coyne, after he buys a suit on the Internet that is supposedly haunted and finds out that he’s made a deadly mistake — he was set-up to buy the suit by an angry woman who blames him for her sister’s death, and now he has the also angry ghost of her step-father to contend with. This book has everything — characters with heart and believable, complicated motivations; well-crafted scares, some subtle and chilling, some shocking and pulse-pounding; surprising revelations (everything you thought you knew about the homicidal ghost, the dead girl, and Jude are all turned upside-down but are still completely believable); and an excellent, bittersweet ending. This becomes a psychological horror story, as all of the characters are haunted by their pasts; as Hill shows us, this haunting is the most damaging and the hardest kind to dispel.
What I didn't know until months after I read this, is that Joe Hill is Stephen King's son, Joseph Hillstrom King; he used an abbreviated form of his real name to make it as an author on his own merits instead of on the coat-tails of his father. And I think he's done a fine job being scary on his own.
We don't have this in the Lakeside library, but it should be available in any public library. I wanted to do some horror posts for Halloween, and I'm limiting my reviews to books I've actually read, so . . . I say definitely run to the public library and check this one out.