These days I tend to view the box for my horror fix. Along with my son we are Walking Dead aficionados. Once when asking him if he wanted to go to a Drogheda game or a Zombie festival in town he told me he was both soccer mad and zombie mad and that the choice was a hard one to make, imploring me to make it for him. Point of this meandering is to draw attention to a horror history.
My wife suggested I put aside whatever else I was reading and have a go at Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box: she told me I would enjoy it. I rarely quibble with her taste in literature so if she recommends a novel I will, time permitting, usually give it a try, even more so after she introduced me to the joys of Scandinavian crime fiction.
Heart Shaped Box is a tale about a man who buys a ghost over the internet. As always with these things a suspension of disbelief is required otherwise the road is not worth the journey. The buyer is Judas Coyne, a rock singer, and the ghost he bought is Craddock MacDermott, a former US soldier who also had a knack for hypnosis. Judas Coyne was a collector of ‘morbid memorabilia’ so when his PA discovered the ghost for sale he suggested Jude buy it. It came in a heart shaped box and once Jude let Craddock MacDermott out of the box, it was the perennial problem of the genie all over again – how to get it back in.
Craddock was not a friendly ghost like Casper. An American in fact might describe Craddock as one mean motherfucker. He was that for sure. Dark, menacing, baleful, Freddie Kruger in a neatly creased suit, he was one bad hombre, his ghostly and ghastly attributes served up in equal but copious quantities.
Plot, ability to tell a good yarn and enough suspense built into the structure of the narrative is crucial to capturing and sustaining the imagination of the audience with this type of story. Alienate the grounded secular reader too much with wispy tales of spectral beings and the interest tends to fade. The reader has to be able to empathise with the haunted and step into their shoes. Steven King could always get the pitch right and Joe Hill does the same. Seeming suicides, a shrill, demented, hackling woman intent on exacting some sort of revenge, the murder in her heart saturating the air, Heart Shaped Box is nothing short of a gripper of a read.
How does an ageing rock star accompanied by a young girlfriend shake off an unwanted visitor? Jude is not anything if not a quitter. At one point Cradock tells him in laudatory tones, while nonchalantly promising to end his life, that there is no quit in him. In this world sometimes if you want to survive a no quit perspective has its advantages.
Typical for a rocker, his dogs are named Bon and Angus, after the inimitable duo that made up the main plank of ACDC and who prior to Bon Scott’s death in 1980, strutted stages and belted out A Whole Lot of Rosie. The canines are not just tag-alongs, there for the ride or their bite. Their sixth sense could just give the group the edge.
A sub theme is the developing relationship between Coyne and his young girl friend. There is always the anticipation that she is scripted in for the purpose of falling prey to Craddock MacDermott, one of those ultimately dispensable characters whose destination is seemingly charted out and emblazoned in neon lights.
Violent and bloody but never displacing the suspenseful plot, the lover of the horror genre should not go past this one in their search for the fear factor. Michael Miles who in my childhood days hosted Take Your Pick would offer people a choice to take their money or open the box. After reading this there might just be a willingness to settle for the money. If you peer into this Heart Shaped Box you will see only the baleful eyes of Craddock MacDermott, a most unpleasant man.
Joe Hill, 2007, Heart Shaped Box. Gollancz: London. ISBN 9780575081871
Good review Anthony a cara ,you definitely have a knack of making many of us salivate in anticipation of reading the book reviewed,the last horror book book that I have read was Richard O Rawes Blanket Men and as you know it doesnt get any more horrific than that.
ReplyDeleteMackers,
ReplyDeleteReally enjoyed this! There is something very familiar about this 'Heart Shaped Box'
I think I watched two very similar stories on the American paranormal channel, one was about a student buying a box containing an evil spirit the other a writer. I can't remember if it was the one episode or two somewhat linked episodes.
This one sounds a fascinating read, totally love the horror.
Marty/Nuala,
ReplyDeletethanks. I enjoyed it. I have a few reviews still to put out. I find it relaxing doing them.
Good review Mackers, being a Stephen King fan myself I took notice when I saw you were reviewing a book written by his son.
ReplyDeleteJoe Hill has written several books, as yet I haven't got round to reading any. This looks like a good starter.
Joseph Hillstrom King if you read Wikipedia...
"chose to use an abbreviated form of his given name (a reference to executed labor leader Joe Hill, for whom he was named) in 1997, out of a desire to succeed based solely on his own merits rather than as the son of Stephen King.."
Dixie,
ReplyDeleteI hadn't a clue. You surprised me with that one. Just checked it out and he even looks like the da. He is a great writer
From Beano
ReplyDeleteInteresting to read that an academic such as AM has pretty basic tastes when it comes to reading just like the rest of us. And good to know too that it wasn't just the Loyalist faction in Long Kesh who had a penchant for Stephen King.
At one stage-from about the late 70's on, I would say that King was - by a country mile - the most widely read author in jail. Followed closely by Robert Ludlum. I have to say right off that I never was and still am not a huge fan of the horror genre. Of course I went through the Dennis Wheatley collection, without ever being convinced. Tried James Herbert of course. But for most of the time these novels were last resorts or fillers in until something better turned up.
And reverting back to King, the books of his that I rated highest were his non-horror ones. In the true sense of horror. The Dead Zone-The Stand-and his book of short stories - Different Seasons - demand reading time and again. The last produced 3 wonderful novellas, each subsequently made into very good films that have stood the test of time: Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil and Stand By Me. King always had the ability to use nostalgia to enhance a story-something I feel appealed to those incarcerated. Certainly did with me.
Post LK my King addiction somewhat flagged but in recent times has reawakened through the interest of my daughter. And I have to say that his last two has in my opinion put him right back up there to the top of the pile. 11.22.63 imagines what might have happened if John F. Kennedy hadn't been assassinated and Joyland is an erstwhile "horror" story based around a carnival. As always both are full of great characters and have story lines that has you hooked from the start.
The problem I have always found with the great Stephen King novels is that they tend to take up quite a bit of your evening-with me it's always " Ach-just another chapter, then I'll go to bed".........