Cover of Heart-Shaped Box: A Novel
Author: Joe Hill
First Edition: 2000
Original language: English
Awards:
- Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel (2007),
- Locus Award for Best First Novel (2008),
- Macavity Award Nominee for Best First Mystery Novel (2008),
- British Fantasy Award Nominee for Best Novel (2008)
Summary:
Semi-retired heavy metal star Jude Coyne is somewhat fascinated by the macabre. He has a collection including Aleister Crowley’s chess board, several paintings by John Wayne Gacy, a snuff film, and a trepanned skull. When someone online offers to sell him a ghost, he can’t say no. This admittedly bizarre but otherwise mundane transaction end up being the worst decision of Jude’s life.
Quotes:
“He was impossible to embarrass. He didn’t know the meaning of shy.”
“They might have high-speed Internet connections in Baton Rouge, but in the little towns in the swamps north of Lake Pontchartrain, if you wanted a high-speed connection with the rest of the world, you souped up a car and got the fuck out.”
“Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.”
Opinion:
I haven’t really read horror for a while, but realized that I love the genre. I really liked this book and it actually managed to scare me a few times when I was reading at home by myself. It was dark and spooky from the beginning and some of the images were vivid and creepy. Even though I’m not a fan of heavy metal, I liked Jude and found him surprisingly relatable. The heavy metal world was actually a perfect backdrop for the book.
Joe Hill at a book signing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I also liked how Hill kept the tension throughout the book. A couple of times I thought to myself, “ok, now what’s he going to do for the remaining ¾, ½?” But he pulled it off quite nicely and there was actually structure to the novel, something that some horror writers seem to breeze past if not ignore completely.
