Review - HEART-SHAPED BOX, by Joe Hill

Judas Coyne is an aging heavy-metal rock god who seems to be the very cliche of the over-the-hill rock star, from the requisite dead band members, to his interest in the bizarre and the freakish, to his succession of doomed relationships with female groupies whose ages are getting farther and farther removed from his own.

Jude lives on a farm in upstate New York. His "career" now consists of writing and recording songs for his own benefit - hiding them away like he hides himself away, letting his personal assistant handle the minutiae of real life.

When his assistant mentions he's run across the opportunity online to purchase a dead man's ghost - by way of the corpse's suit - for a thousand dollars, Jude jumps at the chance. What else would he do? What else would his fans have expected him to do?

The suit arrives at Jude's door a few days later, and almost immediately, strange occurrences begin happening. Frightening visions. Trance-like states of hypnosis, with blackouts and worse. Then things move quickly from bad to worse, and before you know it, Jude and his girl - a flavor-of-the-month goth chick nicknamed "Georgia" - are running for their lives, trying to outdistance an angry spirit.

I'm not going to run down the plot any further, partly because so many other reviewers already have, and partly because by now you've already decided whether HEART-SHAPED BOX is your cup of tea or not. In some ways it's a very traditional ghost story and in others, not so much.

HEART-SHAPED BOX was originally published in 2007, and I never bothered reading it because, quite simply, I didn't give author Joe Hill a chance. The fact that he was Stephen King's son was supposed to be some kind of big secret, but it was about the worst-kept secret since, well, some other really badly kept secret.

I figured here was the classic example of a guy making money and gaining fame off his father's name, and the fact that he was writing under a different name made it somehow worse. More cynical and calculated, or something.

Boy, was that a mistake, and not just because it shows what a shallow asshole I can be at times.

Joe Hill can really write. He takes a story that's been told around a million campfires and lifts it above the commonplace and into something special, developing a gauzy, southern-gothic atmospheric tension when the story moves from New York State to Georgia, on to Florida, and finally ending in Coyne's boyhood home, a dilapidated farm in Louisiana.

While I resisted reading Joe Hill's work because of his family name, it seems almost comically ironic to note that HEART-SHAPED BOX contains much of the stuff that made me such a die-hard fan of Stephen King's early work, most notably 'SALEM'S LOT and THE SHINING:

- The ability to create characters we may not like but can't help rooting for, maybe because we see ourselves in these people who so often act out of self-interest and personal greed, but who - we hope - have the chance to redeem themselves in the end, perhaps because we hold out the same hope for ourselves.

- The ability to insert humor into the narrative in the unlikeliest places and at the unlikeliest times, without taking away from the suspense, and even, as impossible as it seems, enhancing it.

- The ability to draw the reader into the world he's created, so by the end of the book you're not just watching Judas Coyne and Mary Beth try to fight their way out of the mess they're in, you're right there with them, experiencing the horror that is the relentlessly vengeful Craddock McDermott and his smoke-blue pickup truck.

If you're smarter or more perceptive than I am, maybe you'll see where the book is going before it gets there, and if so, good for you. But I didn't see it coming, so when Hill wraps up the mystery of why Judas Coyne had been chosen - and he was chosen - for haunting, it's a satisfying resolution.

Of course, there's still the pesky question of how - and even whether -the aging rock star and his troubled, three-decades-younger girlfriend will survive, but if you haven't read the book yet, you're going to have to do so to get the answer to that one.

I owe you an apology, Joe Hill. I'm sure you don't care one way or the other, but I didn't give you a chance, and it was my loss missing out on one outstanding horror novel for six years.

Great book. If you love horror - not blood and guts and gore, but real psychological horror - and you haven't read HEART-SHAPED BOX yet, go get it. You won't be sorry.

The coolest gift ever

I'm a writer groupie, okay? I admit it. There's something about owning a book signed by the guy or gal who wrote it that appeals to me, especially now that I understand how much blood, sweat and tears go into producing a book, having written a few myself.

The first signed book I got was also probably the coolest. This is the story:

It's the mid-1980's and my wife and I are living in Bangor, Maine. I had gotten hired by the FAA as an air traffic controller following the disastrous PATCO strike of 1981, when President Reagan fired all the illegally striking controllers (And before you email me about being a scab, save your energy. The strike was illegal and the strikers had 72 hours to go back to work, no questions asked, before losing their jobs. I don't feel guilty and you're not going to change my mind, so get over it already, it's been thirty years), and in the early years of my career I moved around a lot.

So anyway, it's 1986 and we're living in our first house, in Hampden, Maine, one town south of Bangor on I-95. My wife is working as a bank teller in Bangor, and if you know anything about modern genre fiction, even if you don't read horror, you know who Bangor's most famous native son is: Stephen King.

Well, it just so happens that one of the young women working in the bank with my wife is the sister of Stephen King's secretary, or personal assistant, or something. This is the woman who in the days before PC's and the Internet did the typing of King's manuscripts.

Now, Bangor, Maine is not a huge town. Back in the 1980's, when we lived there - and probably even now - if you spent enough time in Bangor you would eventually see Stephen King around town; we certainly did. But of course I never had the nerve to simply approach him and bother him by telling him how much of a fan I was, that's just not my way.

But unbeknownst to me, my wife grabs one of my many Stephen King books over the summer, a short story collection titled SKELETON CREW, and brings it into work with her. She gives it to her friend at the bank, along with a nicely typed card asking Mr. King if he might consider inscribing the book. Her friend passes it along to her sister. I'm completely unaware, my default setting even back then.

Fast-forward to Christmas, 1986. We won't have any kids for another year-and-a-half yet, so it's a pretty small, intimate Christmas morning. My wife is beside herself about one present in particular she wants me to open. It's obviously a hardcover book, which makes a lot of sense since she knows how much I love to read.

But still, it's a book. Why all the excitement?

I open it up and see SKELETON CREW, which, of course, I already own. My wife, who knows me pretty well by now even though we've only been married three years, patiently instructs me to open it up and look inside. This is what I find:

Just in case you can't make it out, here it is:

"For Allan -

with best wishes from

Susan - and me -

Stephen King

9/24/86"

I have to tell you, I about shit myself. Sorry for the graphic depiction of surprise, but there it is. For a genre fan like me it's hard to imagine a better present, and in fact I honestly don't believe I've ever received a cooler or more thoughtful Christmas present.

The funniest part? Between Christmas 1986 and October 1990, when we bought the house in New Hampshire we still live in, my wife and I (and our growing family) lived in four different places, and somewhere along the line, with all that moving, I misplaced that copy of SKELETON CREW.

I was heartbroken. I knew the book was still around somewhere, tucked away inside a box, but I just couldn't find it. A couple of weeks ago I was cleaning some stuff out of our cluttered attic, rummaging through a cardboard box, and there it was!

I was so excited, it was almost like opening that Christmas present again. I mean, that signed book had been lost for over twenty years. I guarantee you, it won't get lost again.