Joe Hill

20th Century Ghosts — (2007) Imogene is young and beautiful. She kisses like a movie star and knows everything about every film ever made. She's also dead and waiting in the Rosebud Theater for Alec Sheldon one afternoon in 1945... Arthur Roth is a lonely kid with big ideas and a gift for attracting abuse. It isn't easy to make friends when you're the only inflatable boy in town... Francis is unhappy. Francis was human once, but that was then. Now he's an eight-foot-tall locust and everyone in Calliphora will tremble when they hear him sing... John Finney is locked in a basement that's stained with the blood of half a dozen other murdered children. In the cellar with him is an antique telephone, long since disconnected, but which rings at night with calls from the dead...

20th Century Ghosts

Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. Good, now that’s out of the way. 20th Century Ghosts is a prime collection of short fiction. Some stories are horror, some are literary horror and some aren’t horror at all. Hill has a strong style, a distinctive voice, and a willingness to indulge in post-modernism. This means that the conclusions of some stories are left up to the reader. This is not the undisciplined writing of someone who can’t commit to a resolution, but a literary choice executed with intent and skill.  In “Best New Horror” and “In the Rundown,” readers must decide for themselves what comes after the final paragraph.

“Best New Horror” is a familiar tale, and a tasty mélange of tropes; bits of H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, The Hills Have Eyes, and even the Serial Killer Convention in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, all spiced with a sprinkling of sinister glee that makes the whole thing work.

“Pop Art” is one of the better stories about friendship and loss, with an original element perfectly introduced into the story. The story has resonance with the last novella in the book, “Voluntary Committal.” “The Black Telephone” is an exercise in desperation, with a palpable grounding in the real world.

“20th Century Ghost,” the title story, tells us a sweet tale about a decaying movie palace and a ghost that loves movies.

“You Will Hear the Locust Sing” blends Kafka with the 1950s vintage B-movie Them, about giant ants. I found the physical details to be spot-on, although I’m not sure I really understood the story.

By far the most surreal and disturbing work in the book is “My Father’s Mask.” I finished this story and thought, “Whoa, that’s shocking.” A day later when I was pulling weeds the story finally clicked for me and I thought, “Oh, my God! It’s going to happen again!” Because clearly, it is what always happens.

Terry Weyna recommended Joe Hill to me, and I have to thank her. I look forward to more of his work. I don’t know how well he manages the longer form, but Hill is a short-story master. —Marion Deeds

Heart-Shaped Box — (2007) Publisher: Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre: a cookbook for cannibals... a used hangman's noose... a snuff film. An aging death-metal rock god, his taste for the unnatural is as widely known to his legions of fans as the notorious excesses of his youth. But nothing he possesses is as unlikely or as dreadful as his latest discovery, an item for sale on the Internet, a thing so terribly strange, Jude can't help but reach for his wallet. I will "sell" my stepfather's ghost to the highest bidder... For a thousand dollars, Jude will become the proud owner of a dead man's suit, said to be haunted by a restless spirit. He isn't afraid. He has spent a lifetime coping with ghosts — of an abusive father, of the lovers he callously abandoned, of the bandmates he betrayed. What's one more? But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no imaginary or metaphorical ghost, no benign conversation piece. It's the real thing. And suddenly the suit's previous owner is everywhere: behind the bedroom door... seated in Jude'srestored vintage Mustang... standing outside his window... staring out from his widescreen TV. Waiting — with a gleaming razor blade on a chain dangling from one bony hand... A multiple-award winner for his short fiction, author Joe Hill immediately vaults into the top echelon of dark fantasists with a blood-chilling roller-coaster ride of a novel, a masterwork brimming with relentless thrills and acid terror.

Heart-Shaped Box

Joe Hill is the most promising new horror writer on the horizon. His first book, a collection of short stories called 20th Century Ghosts. It was a revelation: quirky, brilliant and scary. I gave it a rave review when I first read it, and I still return to those stories every now and then just to take pleasure in seeing how Hill pulls it off.

Joe Hill’s first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, fulfills the promise of those short stories. It contains enough change-ups, chases, oddities and horrific images to keep any seasoned horror reader in goosebumps. Far more accomplished than most first novels, Heart-Shaped Box is the best kind of scary pleasure.

Hill’s hero — or his antihero, depending on how you look at it — is Judas Coyne, an aging death-metal rocker. He has modeled himself around his stage persona, it seems, posing as a foul-mouthed son of a bitch who takes advantage of the pretty and totally messed-up young women who are attracted to his music. Just to add some spice, he has the repulsive hobby of collecting grotesqueries: the skull of a peasant who had been trepanned in the sixteenth century to let demons out, a noose used to hang a man in the nineteenth century, even a genuine snuff film. His hobby makes him the perfect mark when an email from an auction site offers a ghost for sale. He immediately snatches it up, without a thought as to what owning a ghost would actually mean. But then, he assumes it’s really nothing more than a dead man’s suit with an odd reputation.

Jude is surprised, then, to find that the idea of donning the suit, or seeing his live-in Goth girl (called Georgia because that’s the state she’s from) in it, deeply repulses him. He’s taken aback at his own disgust, as he’s made a living out of the disgusting for 30 years. But revulsion is only the beginning.

It turns out that Jude really has bought a ghost. A real, live, dead ghost. And the ghost is malevolent, seeking revenge for the death of someone Jude once knew. That someone loved him, and he rejected her, and the ghost is angry. Soon Jude is running for his life, trying to outrun the ghost by tracking it to its source, while he and Georgia accumulate both physical and psychic injuries. And he’s running, too, from his own childhood, his own adulthood, his own sins. The tale begins to twist under one’s eyes like a snake, shiny and dangerous, very possibly sufficient to keep the reader awake at night. Or at least until the last page is turned.

Heart-Shaped Box does not contain much of the wild experimentation and newness that characterized 20th Century Ghosts. This is not a fault in the novel, however. To the contrary, it is refreshing to read a good, solid ghost story. It is thrilling to follow this rollercoaster, one with unexpected drops and odd, wild turns. The writing is crisp and clean, the characters sharply delineated. Clear your calendar for a day to read this one — and do so with the lights on.

I should note what is now an open secret: Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King. I only mention this to say that Hill is not King, but his own man. While one can see the influence of the father on the son, it is no more than one would expect King to have had on any writer entering the horror field after growing up on King’s novels. This book is entirely Joe Hill’s. And it’s good. —Terry Weyna

Horns — (2010) Publisher: Ignatius Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke up the next morning with a thunderous hangover, a raging headache... and a pair of horns growing from his temples. At first Ig thought the horns were a hallucination, the product of a mind damaged by rage and grief. He had spent the last year in a lonely, private purgatory, following the death of his beloved, Merrin Williams, who was raped and murdered under inexplicable circumstances. A mental breakdown would have been the most natural thing in the world. But there was nothing natural about the horns, which were all too real. Once the righteous Ig had enjoyed the life of the blessed: born into privilege, the second son of a renowned musician and younger brother of a rising late-night TV star, he had security, wealth, and a place in his community. Ig had it all, and more — he had Merrin and a love founded on shared daydreams, mutual daring, and unlikely midsummer magic. But Merrin's death damned all that. The only suspect in the crime, Ig was never charged or tried. And he was never cleared. In the court of public opinion in Gideon, New Hampshire, Ig is and always will be guilty because his rich and connected parents pulled strings to make the investigation go away. Nothing Ig can do, nothing he can say, matters. Everyone, it seems, including God, has abandoned him. Everyone, that is, but the devil inside... Now Ig is possessed of a terrible new power to go with his terrible new look — a macabre talent he intends to use to find the monster who killed Merrin and destroyed his life. Being good and praying for the best got him nowhere. It's time for a little revenge... It's time the devil had his due...

Horns

CLASSIFICATION: Horns is a murder mystery/love story/revenge thriller with a dark supernatural twist in the vein of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub.
 
FORMAT/INFO: Horns is 384 pages long divided over 4 titled Parts and 50 numbered chapters. Narration is in the third-person, mainly via the protagonist Ignatius “Ig” Perrish, but also includes narratives by the villain and Ig’s older brother Terry. Horns is self-contained.

February 16, 2010 marks the North American Hardcover publication of Horns via William Morrow. The UK edition will be published on February 18, 2010 via Gollancz. PS Publishing is also producing two limited edition versions of Horns: 1) A Slipcased Copy Signed by Joe Hill with interior color plates by Vincent Chong, and 2), a Signed Traycased Edition limited to 200 copies.
 
NOTE: Horns was optioned for film adaptation by Mandalay Pictures (Sleepy Hollow) back in October 2009.
 
ANALYSIS: In his short, but already illustrious career, Joe Hill has established himself as the real deal, winning well-deserved awards for both his short fiction and novel debut as well as succeeding in the world of comic books with the highly praised LOCKE & KEY series. Does the magic continue in Joe Hill’s newest novel, Horns?
 
Well, writing-wise, Horns once again finds Joe Hill at the top of his game, in particular his uncanny ability to examine humanity in all of its beauty and ugliness. This is done through fully fleshed out characters (Iggy Perrish, Merrin Williams, Lee Tourneau, Terry Perrish, Glenna Nicholson, Eric Hannity) who readers can care for, sympathize with, or hate; piercing insights about love, sin or other topics relevant in everyday life; and the author’s keen and vivid descriptive abilities:

• “It was something, the way the wheelchair picked up speed, the way a person’s life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and, like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.”
• “Ig had always liked to listen to his father, to watch him while he played. It was almost wrong to say his father played. It often seemed the other way around: that the horn was playing him. The way his cheeks swole out, then caved in as if he were being inhaled into it, the way the golden keys seemed to grab his fingers like little magnets snatching at iron filings, causing them to leap and dance in unexpected, startling fits. The way he shut his eyes and bent his head and twisted back and forth at the hips, as if his torso were an auger, screwing its way deeper and deeper into the center of his being, pulling the music up from somewhere in the pit of his belly.”
• “Hopefully, over the years of being best friends, Lee would learn the truth about music: that it was the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours, to feel something, to burn with all the emotions you didn’t get to experience in the ordinary run of school and TV and loading the dishwasher after dinner.”

The story, however, was somewhat disappointing because of its familiarity. The hero blamed for a crime he didn’t commit; discovering the real murderer; exacting revenge against that murderer; the tale of youths falling in love; learning why Merrin was killed in the first place... the subplots in Horns are fairly conventional, aside from Ig suddenly developing devil-like abilities. Even the execution, while skillfully handled, was largely formulaic right down to the flashbacks, foreshadowing and other well-used plot devices.

Creatively, I loved the idea of the hero using abilities usually associated with evil, especially the ‘horns’ which caused people to confess their darkest urges — their worst and most shameful impulses — and asking permission to commit more. The only problem I had with this concept is that I felt the abilities that Ig develops and the many references Joe Hill makes to Satan over the course of the novel were a bit too cliché, like being able to learn all of a person’s guilty secrets upon skin contact, commanding snakes, wielding a pitchfork as a weapon, ‘luck of the devil’, 666, the gift of tongues, “The Devil Inside”, Asmodeus, ‘devil in a blue dress’, and so on.

Comparatively, while Horns is another well-written and entertaining novel, I felt it lacked the surprise twists and jaw-dropping moments of Heart-Shaped Box. I also thought Joe Hill’s debut was more original overall and less predictable in its presentation than the author’s new book. Nevertheless, I immensely enjoyed reading Horns and believe the novel will only add to Joe Hill’s growing legacy. —Robert Thompson