Heart-shaped box

Review by New York Times Review

THERE'S some evidence that middle-aged heavy metal rock stars lead quiet, blameless lives, doing nothing more satanic than working on their golf and riding A.T.V.'s. But things are very different for Judas Coyne, the protagonist of Joe Hill's first novel. Coyne, once the guitarist and presiding genius behind a band called Jude's Hammer, is a collector of macabre artifacts, including a trepanned skull, a snuff film and Aleister Crowley's childhood chessboard (not all that macabre this last one, I think). So when he has the chance to buy a haunted suit from an online auction site, how can he resist? As it turns out, the suit belonged, and in a sense still does, to one Craddock McDermott, a Vietnam vet turned dowser and mesmerist, and the stepfather of one of Coyne's ex-girlfriends who committed suicide a few years back in ambiguous and bloody circumstances after Coyne ditched her. Coyne's acquisition of the suit unleashes a fine sampling of supernatural horror: visual and auditory hallucinations, induced suicide, phantom dogs, phone calls from the dead, a spirit invoked via a Ouija board and a door drawn on the floor in blood, leading to another dimension. Since the ghost in the suit seems to be untroubled by the rules of time and space, hitting the road seems unlikely to provide much of a solution, but that's what Coyne and his current girlfriend, Georgia, do. They drive a classic Mustang and Craddock pursues them in a cool old phantom Chevy pickup, which is probably going to look great in the movie version. Those of us stuck with the novel have to make do with some strictly meat-and-potatoes prose: shoulders twitch in reflexive surprise; glances are thrown out of windows; upper lips draw back in sneers; eyes glitter like water at the bottom of a well. The description of characters is worse, and some of it sounds like casting notes: Coyne's assistant, Danny, has "high, arched, Jack Nicholson eyebrows"; someone's voice has always reminded Jude "of the comic Steven Wright"; another character bears "a passing resemblance to Charlton Heston." This really doesn't count as novel writing at all, does it? As the book journeys on, we discover that the root and cause of the horror is plain, nasty and all too human: incest and child abuse. Some might think this was overseasoning the bloody mary, but Hill is untroubled by the possibility that more might be less. In a scene as ludicrous as it is unpleasant the ghost climbs into the mouth of Coyne's dying father, like "a wad of Saran Wrap sucked into the tube of a vacuum cleaner." Actually, paternal relationships are pretty vexed throughout the novel; the father once deliberately smashed Coyne's hand with a basement door, quite a blow to a guitarist. Maybe the ghost is performing an act of revenge on the father. Maybe. By this time all pretense at narrative logic or coherence has been abandoned, and Georgia's repeated, italicized, cries of "Why?" are likely to be echoed by the reader. Still, if this is the kind of thing you like, then you're probably going to like this a lot. Whether the book will achieve any sort of pop-horror critical mass is hard to say, but Hill seems to know his audience. The publicity material tells us the movie rights are sold and foreign rights have been sold in "17 countries and counting." However, the publicity declines to tell us another fact, that Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King. I don't know the significance of that omission but I do know that the book contains the line "If hell was anything, it was talk radio - and family." In a better book you'd be inclined to read something into that. Geoff Nicholson's most recent book is "Sex Collectors."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

This riveting debut novel is so hip and so frightening that there are sure to be scaredy copycats next year. Aging rock god Jude Coyne is enjoying his semi-retirement as a recluse on his farm with his beloved dogs; his latest groupie-cum-girlfriend, Georgia; and a creepy hobby, collecting objets des macabres. Jude's latest addition to his ghoulish collection is a ghost. The specter resides in an old-fashioned Sunday suit, and, once released from the titular heart-shaped box, begins a mission of revenge. Swinging a curved razor, the black-eyed spirit hypnotizes its victims. Jude's assistant, Danny, hangs himself. Then Georgia sticks a gun in her mouth. Even Jude is not immune to the phantom's murderous lullabies and finds himself in the front seat of his cream-puff Mustang, inhaling carbon monoxide. Hill's tone is gleefully morbid, and his plot plunges and flies like a roller coaster trying to dump all of its shrieking passengers. Both an original effort and an honorable homage to the author's father, horrormeister Stephen King (Hill's real surname is King, too), Heart-Shaped Box heralds the arrival of a horribly good new talent.--Mediatore Stover, Kaite Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Stoker-winner Hill features a particularly merciless ghost in his powerful first novel. Middle-aged rock star Judas Coyne collects morbid curios for fun, so doesn't think twice about buying a suit advertised at an online auction site as haunted by its dead owner's ghost. Only after it arrives does Judas discover that the suit belonged to Craddock McDermott, the stepfather of one of Coyne's discarded groupies, and that the old man's ghost is a malignant spirit determined to kill Judas in revenge for his stepdaughter's suicide. Judas isn't quite the cad or Craddock the avenging angel this scenario makes them at first, but their true motivations reveal themselves only gradually in a fast-paced plot that crackles with expertly planted surprises and revelations. Hill (20th Century Ghosts) gives his characters believably complex emotional lives that help to anchor the supernatural in psychological reality and prove that (as one character observes) "horror was rooted in sympathy." His subtle and skillful treatment of horrors that could easily have exploded over the top and out of control helps make this a truly memorable debut. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Rocker Judas Coyne collects creepy stuff like a hangman's noose but when he buys a ghost off the Internet, he's in real trouble. This wraith is the stepfather of a girl Judas loved and left to suicide. Movie rights have already vanished. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Adult/High School-Hill, two-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award for his short fiction, delivers a terrifyingly contemporary twist to the traditional ghost story with his first novel. Aging rock star Judas Coyne is a collector of bizarre and macabre artifacts: a used hangman's noose, a snuff film, and rare books on witchcraft. When he purchases a suit billed in an online auction as the haunted clothes of a recently deceased man, Coyne finds more than he bargained for. Everywhere he looks he sees the twisted spirit of an old and evil man following him and dangling a deadly razor on a chain. He learns that the suit belonged to Craddock McDermott, the stepfather of a former lover who committed suicide shortly after Coyne tossed her out of his life. McDermott, a professional hypnotist prior to his death, swore to destroy Coyne's rock-star life of self-indulgence to avenge her death. The behind-the-scenes look at stardom alongside the frightening pyrotechnics of McDermott's ghost will draw in teens who really enjoy a good scare. But like all good ghost stories, Hill also crafts a deftly plotted mystery as McDermott's true motivations and powers unfold. The depth of character hidden in the dark shadows of both men lifts what could otherwise be a formula supernatural thriller to an impressive debut.-Matthew L. Moffett, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A rock star buys a ghost who chases him from New York to Florida, blood spurting all the way. Jude Coyne, after a career in the darker reaches of the rock-music world, lives in upstate New York with Georgia, the latest in a succession of young pierced admirers he calls by the states of their birth. Georgia's predecessor, Florida, is at the heart of the troubles that arrive when Coyne answers an ad offering a ghost, something special to add to his collection of creepy items that includes a Mexican snuff film. The ghost inhabits a garish suit of clothes that arrives in a heart-shaped box, and the situation is a set-up. Knowing Coyne's taste for the weird, Florida's sister has inveigled him into buying the soul of her and Florida's stupendously evil stepfather, Craddock, a stinker who learned a lot of very bad magic as a soldier in Vietnam. The motive is the apparent suicide of Florida, who Coyne sent home after one too many bouts of depression. Craddock's ghost immediately gets into Coyne's head, urging him to murder Georgia and then commit suicide. Coyne resists, but the bad vibes are too much for his gay personal assistant, who flees the farm and hangs himself. Craddock persists in his attack on Coyne, using a ghostly truck as his assault vehicle. Lesser rock stars would have capitulated early on, but Georgia turns out to be full of spunk, and Coyne's German Shepherds are fierce protectors who the ghost greatly fears. To get rid of Craddock, Coyne figures he will have to go to Florida to find out just what did happen to make that ghost such an abusive spirit. Much will be made of the kinship of Hill and his superstar father, Stephen King, but Hill can stand on his own two feet. He's got horror down pat, and his debut is hair-raising fun. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Heart-Shaped Box A Novel Chapter One Jude had a private collection. He had framed sketches of the Seven Dwarfs on the wall of his studio, in between his platinum records. John Wayne Gacy had drawn them while he was in jail and sent them to him. Gacy liked golden-age Disney almost as much as he liked molesting little kids; almost as much as he liked Jude's albums. Jude had the skull of a peasant who had been trepanned in the sixteenth century, to let the demons out. He kept a collection of pens jammed into the hole in the center of the cranium. He had a three-hundred-year-old confession, signed by a witch. "I did spake with a black dogge who sayd hee wouldst poison cows, drive horses mad and sicken children for me if I wouldst let him have my soule, and I sayd aye, and after did give him sucke at my breast." She was burned to death. He had a stiff and worn noose that had been used to hang a man in England at the turn of the nineteenth century, Aleister Crowley's childhood chessboard, and a snuff film. Of all the items in Jude's collection, this last was the thing he felt most uncomfortable about possessing. It had come to him by way of a police officer, a man who had worked security at some shows in L.A. The cop had said the video was diseased. He said it with some enthusiasm. Jude had watched it and felt that he was right. It was diseased. It had also, in an indirect way, helped hasten the end of Jude's marriage. Still he held on to it. Many of the objects in his private collection of the grotesque and the bizarre were gifts sent to him by his fans. It was rare for him to actually buy something for the collection himself. But when Danny Wooten, his personal assistant, told him there was a ghost for sale on the Internet and asked did he want to buy it, Jude didn't even need to think. It was like going out to eat, hearing the special, and deciding you wanted it without even looking at the menu. Some impulses required no consideration. Danny's office occupied a relatively new addition, extending from the northeastern end of Jude's rambling, 110-year-old farmhouse. With its climate control, OfficeMax furniture, and coffee-and-cream industrial carpet, the office was coolly impersonal, nothing at all like the rest of the house. It might have been a dentist's waiting room, if not for the concert posters in stainless-steel frames. One of them showed a jar crammed with staring eyeballs, bloody knots of nerves dangling from the backs of them. That was for the All Eyes On You tour. No sooner had the addition been built than Jude had come to regret it. He had not wanted to drive forty minutes from Piecliff to a rented office in Poughkeepsie to see to his business, but that would've probably been preferable to having Danny Wooten right here at the house. Here Danny and Danny's work were too close. When Jude was in the kitchen, he could hear the phones ringing in there, both of the office lines going off at once sometimes, and the sound was maddening to him. He had not recorded an album in years, had hardly worked since Jerome and Dizzy had died (and the band with them), but still the phones rang and rang. He felt crowded by the steady parade of petitioners for his time, and by the never-ending accumulation of legal and professional demands, agreements and contracts, promotions and appearances, the work of Judas Coyne Incorporated, which was never done, always ongoing. When he was home, he wanted to be himself, not a trademark. For the most part, Danny stayed out of the rest of the house. Whatever his flaws, he was protective of Jude's private space. But Danny considered him fair game if Jude strayed into the officeâ€"something Jude did, without much pleasure, four or five times a day. Passing through the office was the fastest way to the barn and the dogs. He could've avoided Danny by going out through the front door and walking all the way around the house, but he refused to sneak around his own home just to avoid Danny Wooten. Besides, it didn't seem possible Danny could always have something to bother him with. But he always did. And if he didn't have anything that demanded immediate attention, he wanted to talk. Danny was from Southern California originally, and there was no end to his talk. He would boast to total strangers about the benefits of wheatgrass, which included making your bowel movements as fragrant as a freshly mowed lawn. He was thirty years old but could talk skateboarding and PlayStation with the pizza-delivery kid like he was fourteen. Danny would get confessional with air-conditioner repairmen, tell them how his sister had OD'd on heroin in her teens and how as a young man he had been the one to find his mother's body after she killed herself. He was impossible to embarrass. He didn't know the meaning of shy. Jude was coming back inside from feeding Angus and Bon and was halfway across Danny's field of fireâ€"just beginning to think he might make it through the office unscathedâ€"when Danny said, "Hey, Chief, check this out." Danny opened almost every demand for attention with just this line, a statement Jude had learned to dread and resent, a prelude to half an hour of wasted time, forms to fill out, faxes to look at. Then Danny told him someone was selling a ghost, and Jude forgot all about begrudging him. He walked around the desk so he could look over Danny's shoulder at his computer screen. Danny had discovered the ghost at an online auction site, not eBay but one of the wannabes. Jude moved his gaze over the item description while Danny read aloud. Danny would've cut his food for him if Jude gave him the chance. He had a streak of subservience that Jude found, frankly, revolting in a man. Heart-Shaped Box A Novel . Copyright © by Joe Hill . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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