Review of Joe Hill’s “Heart Shaped Box” and “Horns”
Stephen King had quite the impact on my life. I spent weeks cringing anytime someone sneezed after reading The Stand and my dislike of clowns was fully cemented through It. (I was already mildly terrified of spiders which didn’t help matters.) I can still visualize random scenes from various King novels as vividly as some of my own memories. So when I found out (a few years late) that his son had published horror novels under the name Joe Hill, I knew immediately that I HAD to read them. And I was right. These books needed to be read, but not because the author is Stephen King’s son. Joe Hill may have followed in his father’s footsteps by writing horror but it is his voice, and his alone, that colors the stories.
I began with The Heart Shaped Box and as I’ve noted in a previous post, managed to give myself the creeps within the first few chapters. The summary seems simple enough. An aging rockstar who collects morbid items is contacted about purchasing a dead man’s suit with the idea that the ghost will follow said suit. Of course the suit is purchased. The problem is the transaction was a set up and the ghost has a personal vendetta against our star. Sounds like a standard horror plot. However the ghost was just the surface fright, the equivalent of a formulaic scary movie. As Hill moves his characters deeper into the plot, the true terror is revealed not in the supernatural, but in the depths of corrupted human minds. While the idea of a ticked off ghost is disturbing enough, the realization that it was simply the continuation of a truly twisted psyche gave me chills.
Hill continues this theme in Horns. A man loses the love of his life in a brutal rape/murder that most of the town believes he committed although there’s no evidence. He spends a year in his own personal purgatory until he wakes up one morning hung over, with a raging headache and a pair of horns. People tend to overlook the horns though and are instead compelled to admit their deepest, darkest fantasies & thoughts. Through this and the ability to read memories through touch, the protagonist quickly learns the actual events of his beloved’s death while Hill simultaneously reveals that the horror lies not with the emerging Devil, but with the humans and their capacity for pure selfishness and evil. Even with the overwhelming intensity of malevolence exhibited by the revealed killer, it is still the everyday human thoughts that were most upsetting.
Human depravity is much more frightening than any boogeyman. It’s the monsters that lurk within our psyches that terrify me. Those are real. Those walk among us, and within us, every day. Hill skillfully wraps that idea in layers of the bizarre to present stories that not only entertained me but also had me considering night lights.
