TBR Double Dog Dare: Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

My third book in the TBR Double Dog Dare (hosted by James at James Reads Books) was Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill. I actually finished this a few weeks ago, but am just now getting around to writing about it.

Joe Hill is definitely taking his place as one of my new favorites writers. I STILL haven't seen the movie version of his book Horns, but I very much want to. And on the side I have recently been reading his comic book series Locke and Key which is also awesome. (Does that violate the TBR Double Dog Dare rules? Maybe so -- but James says exceptions are OK so I am making an exception for these comics. They are worth it!)

Heart-Shaped Box is a wildly inventive, page-turning story about Judas ("Jude") Coyne, an aging rocker who has a taste for the darker things in life. His music is dark, and he attracts young beautiful women who shack up with him for a while before he grows tired of them and kicks them out. He also collects oddities and occult items, so one day his assistant comes across an online auction that seems perfectly tailored for Jude (mainly because it IS tailored for him, we find out later in the story). It seems that the seller is offering a suit that belonged to her dead stepfather. It's basically a haunted suit -- the seller thinks the stepfather is linked to it somehow because it's the suit he wanted to be buried in but was not, so he is haunting the family as a result. Buy the suit and you're buying his ghost, is essentially the offer. The idea of buying a ghost to add to his collection is irresistible to Jude, so he buys it, not really thinking it is real, however.

Of course, there is a ghost connected with the suit. He begins to manifest pretty soon after arriving at Jude's house (in a heart-shaped box, no less -- hence the title of the book) and this ghost turns out to be a pretty nasty character. He turns out to be the ghost of Craddock McDermott, not only the stepfather of the seller of the suit, but also stepfather to her sister, who turns out to be one of Jude's cast-off girlfriends, Anna McDermott, who apparently returned home and killed herself. So the arrangement to get Craddock's ghost into Jude's "possession" was carefully calculated to end in the haunting and eventual death of Jude Coyne.

That alone would make for a pretty interesting and terrifying story, and Hill rocks along for a long while playing on that theme. Eventually, however, Jude uncovers a much darker secret behind Anna's death, which turns out not to be related to Jude at all. Then Jude embarks on a quest to find out the truth behind her death, and even enlists her help from beyond the grave to fight and "kill" Craddock's ghost.

It's a really fantastic story (in every sense of that word) and it's one of the best kind of horror stories. Jude goes through a genuine transformation as a result of the events of the story (maybe another layer to the symbolism of the heart-shaped box), and he genuinely regains his heart and his humanity by the end of the story. Although not in such a sappy way as I am making it sound (ha).

I highly recommend this story, and I am eager to read even more of Joe Hill's stuff.  He has a short-story collection that just might find its way into next year's Deal Me In challenge......

Horns by Joe Hill

For the final selection in my R.I.P. Peril the First challenge, I read Horns by Joe Hill.  I chose this specifically as a counterpart to Joyland, hoping it would be an interesting father-son contrast.  I'm not exactly sure what I was expecting from this little experiment, but I can truthfully say that the talent of keeping a reader immersed in a page-turning story must be genetic, because Joe has it as much (or more, I think) than his dad.  Mrs. King is a writer as well, so we could even put together a writerly pedigree, I suppose.

The novel opens as the protagonist, Ignatius Martin Perrish ("Ig" for short, and I JUST NOW realized that his initials are "IMP" -- hmmmmmmm) awakens the morning after a drinking binge.  Ig is coming up on the one-year anniversary of the murder of his girlfriend Merrin Williams, and he would love to be able to forget about it and get over her.  Ig was accused of killing Merrin, but he was never charged in her murder for lack of evidence.

So imagine his surprise when he looks in the mirror and sees small horns beginning to grow out of his head.  And there's something else weird, too -- no one he meets actually sees the horns, or if they do, they forget about them immediately.  And they tell Ig things -- bad things -- that they want to do, and it's almost as if they are seeking his permission (or encouragement) to do them.  Ig is astounded and repulsed by this newfound power over others that he has, but he does eventually begin to use it, sometimes for "good" and sometimes for "evil" (I put those in quotes because the lines are masterfully blurred in this novel), and this alone makes for some very interesting situations.

The novel is a highly entertaining tale of Ig's efforts to both cope with his impending transformation and to find out who really killed Merrin and bring that person to justice (justice at Ig's hands, however).  And when he finds that person, he realizes that Merrin's killer is truly evil, and will require all of Ig's newly-acquired demonic "talents" to overcome.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  The biggest thing I liked about this story was that it was not at all predictable.  Given the premise, one might think the story would unfold in certain ways, but it never went where I thought it was going.  Plus, even though Ig is progressively turning into a demon throughout most of the book, Hill manages to make him one of the most appealing, sympathetic, and understandable characters I have run across lately.  The reader really ends up rooting for Ig pretty early in the book -- at least I did.  And the ending, once again, is not predictable in the slightest, but wholly satisfying nonetheless.

It has not escaped my attention that the movie version of this book, with Daniel Radcliffe as Ig, opens in theaters today.  I'm not a fan of movie theaters for about 23,547 reasons, but I might have to venture out to one sometime soon and see what they did with this book.