Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill

The Story: Judas Coyne (a stage name…. get it?) is kind of this aging “hardcore” rocker guy.  He wears black clothes, has facial hair, has girlfriends that are 20, 30 years younger than him, and has this collection of gross/scary stuff, a used noose, a snuff film, a skull that he uses for a pencil holder… all this weird crap.  When his manager sees a ghost for sale on an e-bayish site, he tells Judas about it and Judas jumps at the chance.

When a heart-shaped box filled with a black suit comes in the mail, Judas barely remembers ordering it and shoves it into his closet.  Immediately, creepy stuff starts happening.  A radio turning itself on and off, lights that were off being on… then Judas starts seeing the ghost of this man with his eyes kind of “scribbled out”… and let’s just say it’s not Casper.  This is a mean ghost and he doesn’t really like Judas.

Come to find out, this man had a beef with Judas in life and promised to settle it in death.  Judas settling his other ghosts (an abusive father, a depressed girlfriend, suicidal bandmates) and wrestling with his sanity… not to mention get away from this crazy ghost… make up the bulk of this book.  The journey takes the reader into Judas’ past and to the deep south, and if you’ve been to the deep south, you know that at least one of these places is scary by default…

What I Thought: I know I told you guys a few days ago that this book was totally freaking me out.  It was.  The first quarter of this book made me keep lights on and look in the shower before I went pee.  The image of this ghost with his eyes scribbled out was kind of just too much for me. Spoooky.

Then everything just got absurd.  I’m not going to give it away, because it really isn’t a horrible book and I don’t want to spoil it for you… but at a certain point, the ghost wasn’t the focus anymore really and the whole story just kind of came unstrung.  I think it was right around the time that Judas and his girlfriend decided to take a road trip to visit the ghost’s family. It seemed like somewhere in there, Joe Hill got kind of lost in his writing and forgot what he was doing.  I read the rest of it in one fell swoop because I wasn’t even remotely creeped out anymore.  I was even home by myself.  And, like I told you, I’m getting wimpy.

If the last half was a little bit of a mess, the last 30 pages or so were pretty well disaster level.  I had to re-read parts because I couldn’t even imagine that this is where he chose to take this story.  It was totally bizarre and really didn’t have anything to do with all of the build-up.  It was totally bizarre.

What really got me though was how frigging unoriginal everything was.  Everything that happened in this book has happened in books before.  All the characters are kind of cardboard cut-outs.  The story was predictable to the very end.  This, more than anything, got under my skin.

I cannot deny, however, that I just devoured this book.  I read it in just a few sittings and thought about it for a few days afterwards.  So I didn’t hate it, I was just disappointed with where he took it after such a promising start.

I really did try to go into this and clear my mind of the fact that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son.  I wanted to let him stand alone. I know that’s why he took on a pen name…but let’s be honest: he should have done something other than a horror novel.  Even a thriller or something, at least to start, right?  I honestly couldn’t help but compare.  Sorry, Joe.

I did go and check out his second book, Horns, from the library after I finished this one, so I’ll let you know soon how that goes!

Conclusion: Read the first half of this during the day or at the beach or somewhere where you can let yourself get really good and scared without it interrupting your sleep.  I would rate this somewhere right down the middle, but I’ve read both glowing and scathing reviews of it, so I don’t know. Give it a go. Let me know what you think.