Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box

No, he’s not Joe Hill, singer and labor activist, whose 1915 execution still stirs up
controversy and debate. And he’s not Blind Joe Hill, West Virginian blues singer,
or bearded Joe Hill, bassist with ZZ Top.

His full name is Joseph Hillstrom King, and he is the
son of horror fiction royalty, the progenitor King in this
instance is Stephen King, whose books have sold 350
million copies. Hill adopted his pseudonym out of a
desire to succeed on his own, without the boost of an
illustrious literary lineage to generate a ready-made
audience. (By the way, his name does reflect a different
connection to the past—he was named after the famous
labor leader.)

Hill succeeded in keeping his real identity a secret for the
first decade of his writing career. Well, more or less. As
one fellow author grumbled: it was “the worst-kept secret
in the history of secrets.” Rumors circulated, spurred both
by a similarity in subject and style, as well as an equally
marked resemblance in personal appearance. One glance
at father and son, and the DNA match is pretty much
confirmed. But when Hill sold the movie rights to Heart-
Shaped Box to Warner Bros. in 2006, Variety announced
that the author’s father was Stephen King, and the next year Hill publicly acknowledged
his family ties. "I really wanted to allow myself to rise and fall on my own merits," he
explained to the press. "One of the good things about it was that it let me make my
mistakes in private."

Should he have kept his illustrious gene pool a secret? Don’t underestimate the downside
of having a famous writer for a father. I could cite chapter and verse about children of
literary masters I’ve known who never realized their own enormous potential because of
the large shadow cast by a legendary parent. So I give Hill credit for putting himself into
competition with the best—inviting comparisons that few authors would relish, even if
they would enjoy the benefits of a relative’s renown or connections.

And not only does Joe Hill invite (and live up to, let me add) comparisons with his
bestselling father in his debut novel, but he also takes the oldest—and, dare I say, the
stalest?—horror subgenre, the ghost story, and makes it feel fresh and contemporary.
Would you like to have the task of interesting an agent or editor in a ghost story in the
21st century? I’d pass on that. Or, put differently, if writing tasks were assigned degree
of difficulty ratings, like platform dives and skating moves, Joe Hill maxed out on his
maiden voyage.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that Hill’s first book deals with a son who changes his name,
but finds himself drawn back into his past, in particular his relationship with his father.
Justin Cowzynski has pursued a long, successful career as a doom metal musician in
the mold of Ozzy and company (and I don’t mean Harriet, David and Ricky), but to grab
an audience he needed a nastier name—eventually settling on the quasi-Biblical Judas
Coyne, with its overtones of hanging and thirty pieces of silver. In this new guise, he
enjoys gold records and goth groupies galore, and has now settled down to an unsettled
middle-age, which is about to get even more unsettling.

You see, Judas has another thing in common with his author. Both have an interest in
the occult. Coyne’s private collection includes a hangman’s noose, a witch’s confession
and a chess set once owned by Aleister Crowley, but he’s always on the lookout for
something new and creepy to add to the archive. His assistant Danny obliges him,
one inauspicious morning, when he announces to his boss that a ghost is for sale on
the Internet.

How can Coyne resist such an unusual offer. Check out the details:

"“I will 'sell' my stepfather’s ghost to the highest bidder," explains the web listing. "Of
course a soul cannot really be sold, but I believe he will come to your home and abide
with you if you put out the welcome mat….Do not think this is a stunt or a practical joke
and that I will take your money and send you nothing. The winning bidder will have
something solid to show for their investment. I will send you his Sunday suit. I believe
that if his spirit is attached to anything, it has to be that."

Coyne is intrigued, and when he sees that the suit is his own exact size, he can’t resist.
He puts in a thousand dollar offer, and a few days later the suit arrives in a black heart-
shaped box, like something straight out of a Nirvana song.

Judas Coyne should have kept his pieces of silver, and passed on the suit. His life will
never be the same, and not only will he be haunted by his web-bought ghost, but this
spook is a vengeful one. As it turns out, the auction was a sly set-up. The ghost’s daughter
was one of Coyne’s previous Goth groupies, now apparently dead from suicide, and our
rock star has his own black Sabbath to deal with 24/7.

All this happens in the opening pages of Heart-Shaped Box. In fact, Hill moves so
rapidly in setting up the main parameters of his story that readers justifiably wonder
whether he can maintain the initial burst of energy that animates the opening chapters.
But Hill has plenty of plot twists planned for the reader in the next 350 pages, and pushes
his narrative ahead with nary a misstep. I’m hardly surprised that movie rights were
snatched up so quickly, with Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) and Neil Jordan (The
Crying Game) getting on board the project. This story is perfectly suited for cinematic
treatment. Alas, Warner Bros. pulled the plug after Jordan finished the script, but recent
word is that the studio has put the movie back into 'redevelopment'—whatever that
means.

Yet readers don’t need to wait for Hollywood to get its act together. This is a first-rate
genre novel, a book almost as accomplished as Hill’s father’s impressive debut Carrie,
which launched Mr. King’s career three decades earlier. Carrie is a bit more advanced
from the standpoint of structure—King doesn’t get credit for the intricate pointillistic
style with dabs of stream-of-consciousness that distinguished his first book—but Hill
gets top marks for character development and pacing.

The King family legacy can also be detected in the author’s confidence in moving beyond
the familiar tropes of scary stories. Many writers in the horror genre see every character
as either a victim or victimizer, and don’t know how to write a convincing scene that deals
with romance, comedy or anything outside the realm of action and suspense. Strange to
say, some of the best parts of a Stephen King novel have nothing to do with horror, but
merely fill in a back story, or bring a character to life, or add a moment of comic relief.
Joe Hill is much the same, and when he takes an apparent detour in this novel to discuss,
say, groupies or heavy metal, he handles these interludes just as deftly as he does the
dramatic entanglements with supernatural forces.

But choosing between the father and son is splitting hairs. The highest praise I could
apply to Heart-Shaped Box is the simple statement that, if this book had been attributed
to the father instead of the son, it would rank among Stephen King’s finer works.

Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from
Basic Books.

Publication Date: December 17, 2016

This is my year of horrible reading.
I am reading the classics of horror fiction
during the course of 2016, and each week will
write about a significant work in the genre.
You are invited to join me in my annus
horribilis. During the course of the year—if
we survive—we will have tackled zombies,
serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and
monsters of all denominations. Check back
each week for a new title...but remember to
bring along garlic, silver bullets and a
protective amulet. Ted Gioia

My Year of Horrible Reading

Week 1:
Dracula
By Bram Stoker

Week 2:
T he Haunting of Hill House
By Shirley Jackson

Week 3:
T ales of Mystery & Imagination
By Edgar Allan Poe

Week 4:
Carrie
By Stephen King

Week 5:
The Passion According to G.H.
By Clarice Lispector

Week 6:
T ales
By H.P. Lovecraft

Week 7:
T he Exorcist
By William Peter Blatty

Week 8:
The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill

Week 9:
N ausea
By Jean-Paul Sartre

Week 10:
I Am Legend
By Richard Matheson

Week 11:
G host Stories of Henry James
By Henry James

Week 12:
Interview with the Vampire
By Anne Rice

Week 13:
A merican Psycho
By Bret Easton Ellis

Week 14:
L ast Stories and Other Stories
By William T. Vollmann

Week 15:
G host Stories of an Antiquary
By M.R. James

Week 16:
R osemary's Baby
By Ira Levin

Week 17:
T he King in Yellow
By Robert W. Chambers

Week 18:
Rebecca
By Daphne Du Maurier

Week 19
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kōbō Abe

Week 20
The Dark Eidolon
by Clark Ashton Smith

Week 21
O ff Season
by Jack Ketchum

Week 22
B ooks of Blood, Vols. 1-3
by Clive Barker

Week 23
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris

Week 24
T he Orange Eats Creeps
by Grace Krilanovich

Week 25
S trange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Week 26
P sycho
by Robert Bloch

Week 27
F ledgling
by Octavia E. Butler

Week 28
D emons by Daylight
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 29
T he Complete Short Stories
by Ambrose Bierce

Week 30
P et Sematary
by Stephen King

Week 31
O ur Lady of Darkness
by Fritz Leiber

Week 32
G rendel
by John Gardner

Week 33
W hite is for Witching
by Helen Oyeyemi

Week 34
T he Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks

Week 35
K ing Kong
by Edgar Wallace

Week 36
T he Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole

Week 37
The J ohn Silence Stories
by Algernon Blackwood

Week 38
The M agic Toyshop
by Angela Carter

Week 39
The O ther
by Thomas Tryon

Week 40
N ever Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Week 41
G host Story
by Peter Straub

Week 42
J ohn Dies at the End
by David Wong

Week 43
T he Great God Pan
by Arthur Machen

Week 44
The C ipher
by Kathe Koja

Week 45
L et the Right One In
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Week 46
T he Nameless
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 47
Horrorstör
by Grady Hendrix

Week 48
S trangers
by Taichi Yamada

Week 49
W orld War Z
by Max Brooks

Week 50
J urassic Park
by Michael Crichton

Week 51
H eart-Shaped Box
by Joe Hill