Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill

My personal Halloween fiction festival continued with Joe Hill's novel, "Heart-Shaped Box."  This is a ghost story starring Judas Coyne, an aging heavy metal rock star, and his latest girlfriend who he has dubbed Georgia.  Coyne calls all of his semi-disposable girlfriends by the state they originate from, and in this case it's Florida that starts all the trouble.  ("Jude Coyne" is himself escaping from his past as a Louisiana pig farmer's son named Justin Cowzynski.)

It's impossible not to compare Joe Hill's work with Stephen King's, even though I am certain Joe Hill is very tired of seeing this happen.  Hill is King's son, writing under a pseudonym, but the secret has been open since his cover was blown about two years ago.  It's unfair of me to compare the two, even though the comparison is favorable, since "Heart-Shaped Box" is better than the last five published Stephen King novels combined.

It's also unfair of me to wonder how much Stephen King is in Judas Coyne, an aging heavy metal rock star who has retired both from his career and from his life.  Coyne rattles around his Hudson Valley home (which is a remarkably understated property, given Coyne's considerable fortune), emotionally distant from everything around him, including his girlfriend and his dogs.

Fans send him strange, macabre artifacts, which Coyne regards with a detached bemusement.  He keeps them but never looks at them; the cannibal cookbook gathers dust beside the VHS copy of a snuff flick.  He treats his entire life with the same abstract disregard, as something that's important enough to be kept and dusted, but not interesting enough to watch.  Coyne has completely checked out, and considering the last Stephen King novel I read, I don't half wonder at the accuracy of the comparison.

Furthermore, "Heart-Shaped Box" is all about the evil that fathers do.  Several fathers appear in the book, and they are all abusive.  Fathers are something to be escaped from, if not killed outright.  The final showdown involves two evil fathers, one inside the other, one of whom is dying, both of whom want very badly to kill the main characters, and you can't help but wonder if this didn't make for some interesting conversations around the King dinner table come Thanksgiving.

Random speculation aside, it wasn't the scary parts of the book that impressed me.  Any book can be scary.  It's easy - try it and see!  Scary is simple; interesting is hard.  And "Heart-Shaped Box" was, in addition to scary, interesting.  It's been a long time since I read a horror novel where the characters have demonstrably changed by the end, and where that change feels earned rather than tacked on in a half-hearted fashion.     

By the end of the book, just about everything has been turned 90 degrees.  Things that were true in the beginning are no longer true; things that we thought were one thing turn out to actually be an entirely different thing.  That's all I can say without spoiling everything.