Heart Shaped Box - Lists - Bookclubs - Discussion

This is the only book I ve ever seen my girlfriend even begin reading, which is probably nothing she needs broadcasted to the world. I forget how she exactly stumbled across it, but the concept of a dude foolishly buying a ghost over the internet seemingly piqued her interest. She anxiously waited for it to arrive; I was eager too, stoked I might actually catch her reading something other than Star magazine.

About a year later, she still hadn t read it, so I decided to. This works out for both of us, I got to read Heart -Shaped Box , and while she scrutinizes my internet activity, maybe she ll pause to check out this review and find out what the book is about.

Judas Coyne is a hero for this new millennium, a self-indulgent rockstar past his prime with a history of personal issues and full of crass sarcasm and a penchant for the finer things in life: privacy, hot goth chicks half his age with countless tattoos and piercings, and grim artifacts of antiquity like severed skulls and torture devices. When his personal assistant, Danny, comes across an internet offer to purchase a dead man s suit (and supposedly the dude s ghost along with it), Coyne can t possibly pass this up. He buys the suit, and sure enough, the ghost does indeed tag along. It turns out that the offer wasn t exactly what it initially seemed, that this ghost has a more personal connection to him and a hell of a grudge.

Overall, the book was pretty enjoyable, and I d be interested to see what else author Joe Hill might do next. The characters were likable enough, the story wasn t great but did a good job entertaining, and his humor is pretty good throughout (my favorite example was when he s consulting a ouija board and explains that he feels stupid, but once in a music video he had run in mock horror through a field of clover, chased by a dwarf in a dirty leprechaun suit and carrying a chainsaw so acting like a fool isn't exactly new to him). Hill does seem influenced by Stephen King, the most obvious nod of the hat being the crossbreeding of the horror genre and rock and roll, with the title taken from a Nirvana tune, and chapters named after songs by Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, and Led Zeppelin. I d think that fans of Stephen King who are on the verge of soiling themselves in anticipation of his next book can probably use Heart -Shaped Box to get them back to a state of regularity.

UPDATE: I've just learned something interesting thanks to a comment by GoodReads member ShellBell (who apparently has her fingers firmly on the pulse of the publishing world), in which she inquired whether Joe Hill is living up to his old man's reputation. His dad? I pondered the surname, and finally thought, Jesus, don't tell me Benny Hill actually had kids that lived. To confirm this sad truth, I hit up Wikipedia, only to discover that Joe Hill is Stephen King's kid! Well, I'll be damned, no wonder I thought this guy was King-influenced; the influence is more than skin deep, it's confirmed as genetic. I almost have to believe that Joe wrote this story to speculate as to what Larry Underwood (of dad's opus The Stand) would be doing in the present day had the Superflu not come about.

It's funny, nowhere on the book jacket is there any sort of notice that Hill is the living proof that King is capable of reproduction. According to the Wiki-article, Hill decided not to broadcast the connection to see if he could stand on his own merits without the comforting crutch of Big Steve's legacy, much like King's own foray into The Bachman Experiment. At this point, I'm thinking that Hill has officially proven he s not really capable of much more than regurgitating his old man s style, even down to the selection of marketing gimmicks.

Granted, I won t deny that it s somewhat nice to see that the guy is trying to discover if he d be worth a damn without riding dad s coattails, but then I consider that the only reason the public is even getting a sample of his work is because he s King s son (and the publisher undoubtedly knows that if sales are slow they can always slip the word to the press and watch it fly off the shelves like penicillin after a sorority party). This makes any sort of resulting cred pretty flimsy; to take a chance to stand on your own with the possibility of failure is honorable, I don t give it much respect when that potential fall is buffeted by a large, golden parachute. Only someone akin to the heir to the King throne can even consider snobbishly refusing a guaranteed success by distancing themselves from Stephen King. The rest of us need the money: I m sure if most of us had the chance to be published, but we d have to keep up the fa ade of being related to Stephen King for a year, we d immediately be requesting a floorplan of King s house to make to bullshit we were going to spew sound more convincing.