"Heart-Shaped Box" | Eerily, a chip off the old horror writer

"Heart-Shaped Box"
by Joe Hill
Morrow, 376 pp., $24.95

"Heart-Shaped Box" truly deserves the superlatives heaped upon it by the publicists who smoothed the path of this first novel's advent. The story of a rock star "of a certain age" haunted by a vengeful ghost, "Heart-Shaped Box" slips into readers' minds with the ease of breath into lungs: transparently, naturally.

Some horror authors write simplistic morality tales in which gory deaths overtake characters clearly deserving of everything they get. But Justin Cowzynski, aka "Judas Coin," is evil the way we all are, his sins those of omission, of laziness, of cynical weariness, and of finding comfort in familiar pain. As he and his current groupie-cum-girlfriend Marybeth struggle to fend off the dead stepfather of a sweet young thing he callously ditched, their heroism is of the same everyday order as their failings, demanding readers' sympathy and hooking us with hope. The ghostly stepfather makes a formidable foe, a spook in more than one sense of the word, an operative who specialized in torture during his stint in Vietnam.

Joe Hill is Stephen King's son. (This poorly guarded secret was revealed in an April 5, 2006, Variety article about the "Heart-Shaped Box" movie deal.) Comparisons to his father are inevitable. Hill (real name: Joseph Hillstrom King) is just as good and may in time prove to be better. He has only one previous book to his name: a collection of unsettling, surreal short stories, "20th Century Ghosts" (PS Publishing, October 2005, $25). But it won the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award, and one story, "Voluntary Committal," received the World Fantasy Award. Not too shabby.

In the "20th Century Ghosts" story "My Father's Mask," Hill comments obliquely on the emotional mazes that develop between fathers and sons. Parts of "Heart-Shaped Box" address the same issue. It's sure to arise in his work again, given the connection between an author's life and material, and the continuing excellence promised by this novel.