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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2007, 384 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2008, 320 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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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.
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's restored 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.
1
Jude had a private collection.
He had framed sketches of the Seven Dwarfs on the wall of his studio,
in between his platinum records. John Wayne Gacy had drawn them
while he was in jail and sent them to him. Gacy liked golden-age Disney
almost as much as he liked molesting little kids; almost as much as he
liked Jude’s albums.
Jude had the skull of a peasant who had been trepanned in the sixteenth
century, to let the demons out. He kept a collection of pens
jammed into the hole in the center of the cranium.
He had a three-hundred-year-old confession, signed by a witch. “I
did spake with a black dogge who sayd hee wouldst poison cows, drive
horses mad and sicken children for me if I wouldst let him have my
soule, and I sayd aye, and after did give him sucke at my breast.” She was
burned to death.
He had a stiff and worn noose that had been used to hang a man in
England at the turn of the nineteenth century, Aleister Crowley’s ...
In short, Hill knows his audience. If horror is your genre you're likely to find yourself satisfied with his first novel, and with book rights already sold in at least 17 countries and a movie already being planned, it's likely we'll be hearing more from Hill, son of Stephen King, before too long...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Neil Gaiman
Heart-Shaped Box is, quite simply, the best debut horror novel since Clive Barker's Damnation Game, twenty years ago. It's the kind of book that the overworked adjectives people use on book jackets — relentless, gripping, powerful, a genuine page-turner — were really meant to describe, for it's all of those things, and enormously smart besides. A genuinely scary novel filled with people you care about; the kind of book that still stays in your mind after you've turned over the final page. I loved it unreservedly.Joseph Hillstrom King
(pen name: Joe Hill), born in
1971, is the oldest son of
Tabitha and
Stephen King. He has
an older sister, Naomi, and a
younger brother, Owen. His
stories have appeared in a
variety of magazines and his
first book, a collection of
short stories,
20th Century
Ghosts, won the British
Fantasy Award for "Best
Collection" and "Best Short
Fiction" in 2006, but was not
published in the USA until
October 2007.
On the one hand, Hill appears to
...
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