Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars For the Man Who Has Every Creepy Thing Fifty-four-year-old dark rock star Judas “Jude” Coyne (real name Justin Cowzynski) hasn’t toured in three years and is on his umpteenth young Goth girlfriend he nicknames after their home states (the current one being a 23-year-old he calls Georgia) when he buys a ghost from a private online auction. Specifically, he buys the vintage “Sunday suit” the seller says her “spiritualist” stepfather Craddock James McDermott wanted to be buried in but wasn’t, leading him to haunt his bedroom. Jude’s extensive collection of “the grotesque and the bizarre,” much of it sent by his fans, ranges from the confession of a burned witch and a cookbook for cannibals to Aleister Crowley’s childhood chessboard and a “diseased” snuff film, but lacks a ghost, so he can’t resist buying one--without really believing in it. Joe Hill’s The Heart-Shaped Box (2007) being a horror novel, the ghost turns out to be real. When alive McDermott was a hypnotist/dowser, and his stepdaughter Jessica Price has ensnared Jude in an elaborate revenge plot because her little sister Anna-May McDermott (aka Florida) killed herself in depression after he dumped her. When the suit arrives in a heart-shaped box, the ghost starts haunting Jude, freaking out his beloved dogs Angus and Bon, giving Georgia an infected thumb wound, chilling the temperature of Jude’s sprawling Piecliff NY farmhouse, scaring off his personal assistant Danny, sending ominous emails, and malevolently manifesting himself to show off his pendulum hypnotizing razor and scribbled over eyes. Jude searches his occult books for solutions but can only find impractical things like washing in urine (and “he drew the line at water sports”). He doesn’t want to set the police on Jessica Price because he threatened her on the phone when she told him he’d die horribly and alone and because, being a self-made success, he doesn’t want to get help from anyone. At the start of the novel Jude is the prototypical self-centered isolated amoral rock star, but he comes to earn reader sympathy. He grew up in a household with a violently abusive father, Anna-May was subject to clinical depression before Jude met her, Craddock James McDermott is of a magnitude of evil far beyond Jude’s self-centered lazy morality, and Jude is capable of love and self-reflexion. Hill puts us convincingly in Jude’s head as he finds himself in a nightmarish trap, and we root for him to escape it while suspecting that he’s finally going to get his just deserts for, if nothing else, having “become a little too willing to take what he was offered, without wondering at the possible consequences.” Hill also develops Georgia and Anna-May into compelling characters in their own rights, which is one reason why the novel is a good, suspenseful, page-turningly creepy read; as the narrator says at one point, “horror was rooted in sympathy after all.” Hill writes original and evocative similes and is able to scare us and make us laugh at almost the same time. As in the following: --“The driver remained behind the wheel, peering down at him with the calm but intent expression of a doctor considering a new strain of Ebola through a microscope.” --“It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb.” --“Bon, always the shy one, gave Jude a worried, sidelong look, then lowered her head to the thin gruel of his vomit and covertly began to gobble it up.” --“If hell was anything, it was talk radio and family.” The reader of the audiobook, Stephan Lang, is excellent, his narrator sounding a bit like Vincent Price and his Jude a bit like Bronson Pinchot doing a deep voice. Unfortunately, the audiobook suffers from inappropriate techno music that intrudes to end or start scenes or chapters now and then (perhaps timed to start and end CD sides of the audiobook). Hill’s novel falls prey to some of the pitfalls of other fantasy and horror in that he doesn’t always follow the ground rules he sets up. For instance, dogs have souls and can become protective familiars for their human masters, but then during the climax it appears that pigs cannot be familiars. Similarly, at one point we learn from a gay teen who committed suicide rather than reveal his sexuality that souls have no gender, but later during an out of body experience souls are gendered male or female. And despite references to the likes of Trent Reznor, AC/DC, and Ozzy Osbourne, as well as to some of Jude’s hits, and even to a new song he composes in a motel, and despite several hints that music and singing may help with a hostile ghost, Jude doesn’t really sing or play that much in key encounters with Craddock. Finally, although it seems that “the only power he [the ghost] has over you is what you give him,” and that ghosts haunt minds rather than places, Hill makes Craddock a bit too powerful during an excrescent (though entertaining) scene in a Denny’s restaurant where he speaks through an old timer’s electric larynx and all the many customers can hear him, not just Jude and Georgia. As a result, I sometimes got the feeling that Hill is Doing-Whatever-He-Wants-for-Suspense rather than developing an organically and consistently convincing story. Hill’s writing is vivid, though, and the novel becomes an appealing, painful, romantic Southern Gothic buddy road trip into the characters’ pasts. Despite a climax that’s almost too absurdly action oriented, the novel has strong moments of horror, rapture, and sadness. Fans of horror and ghost stories should enjoy it. View all my reviews
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