Reviews with content warning for Child abuse - Heart-Shaped Box

Reviews tagging 'Child abuse'

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

56 reviews

elvenpanther's review against another edition

dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

An interesting read, the end of the novel did tie everything together nicely. I wasn't a huge fan of the main character, Jude. While he had a little bit of character growth by the end, I felt he could have used a lot more. I didn't really get the sense that he fully healed and learned from his life's trauma. He treated the people in his life poorly and kept them at arm's length, but never came to a point of actually apologizing to them.
Everyone has their own life traumas, but that doesn't excuse bad behavior towards others. It felt like Jude was given a pass on his mistreatment of others, simply because he was put through even more trauma.

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kantestadros's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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aloysios's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Slowly build tension after an intriguing start and ups the ante with every new development.
For the latter half of the book I was so hooked that I could barely lay the book aside to fulfill my day to day tasks.

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lanaaa21's review against another edition

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medium-paced

3.0

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chupacobbruh's review against another edition

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dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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sammiterp's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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morganpearcy's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

0.5

I am a horror fan. I hated this book pretty much from start to finish. It is very obvious that the author is attempting throw in a lot of big, scary, challenging and shocking topics to make the book seem complex and dark - but that’s all a mask for 1 and 2 dimensional characters and an author who lacks the imagination and lived experience to give the story any real depth. It was as if the author watched some Law and Order Special Victims Unit episodes and decided one night to sit down and write what is, in essence, a toxic cishet masc hero fantasy - in response. There’s a lot of potential in the overall theme and plot but it just never reached any sort of maturity and completely missed the mark.

Let me explain.

Things I enjoyed about the book:

There’s an unexpected twist.
It’s a quick read.
The scene where Anna yanks on Jude’s beard when he asks a dumbass question about why she thought beards were a liability in a fight.
There’s an attempt (albeit inadequate) at a feel-good ending.

Things I hated about the book:

The ‘torture’ psychological, physical, etc was unimaginative, lacked creativity and was too phallic. Stop regurgitating TV show tropes and give us something real from your own darkness, dear author!
From page 10, I was rooting for the ghost and was thinking it would be a nice story to read where the universe can meet out some justice. I was looking forward to Jude’s death with some serious bloodlust. But no - about 2/3 of the way through there’s a twist and guess what?
BOTH the ghost and the main character are, you guessed it - toxic freaking cishet men. There IS no one to root for.
The women characters are woefully underdeveloped with zero personalities and I couldn’t root for any of them, either. This isn’t an antihero situation. The author is simply completely inadequate in attempting to make Jude a whole character. Read on for an explanation cuz I promised myself some bullet points.
The main character is underdeveloped and there are a lot of distracting incongruencias.
We jump from the intro of Jude as an eccentric musician with a flair for the macabre to Jude as caring but detached lover of barely-adult women to Jude as victim of childhood abuse to Jude as a dog lover who treats his pack like royalty, then back to Jude smashing piglets’ heads against the cement or shooting them with guns to live out a fantasy of patricide and focusing on how the pig’s heads sounded “like watermelons being smashed,” to defender of sexually abused women?! Then to man who would let their royal doggies be in pain in the back seat after having their legs smashed??
None of this did anything to develop the character. You can’t include those kinds of details without some development. Yet, the author wanted to see what stuck and threw everything at the wall when it came to Jude.
It’s not the point of the book, but the author simply doesn’t have the emotional scope, maturity or lived experience to write women SA survivors with any sort of depth or believability. Enough so that it’s distracting.
Like when Jude beats up Mary Beth’s childhood sexual abuser and Mary Beth comes back to the car and becomes physically affectionate with Jude right off the bat. I can’t speak for every SA Survivor - but I am a Survivor myself. All of the women in my life are SA Survivors excepting ONE. And I have NEVER seen that response from an actual survivor upon seeing their abuser. Especially for someone so young, who hasn’t gotten help. That response wasn’t realistic. It simply played into Jude’s toxic masc hero fantasy and what the author obviously thinks people WANT to see. When in reality it was so distractingly incongruous it made me want to plot the author’s actual murder.
It was as if the author, recent to writing the book, had a woman or woman-aligning person in his life reveal that they’re an SA Survivor, he fantasized about his response in his head and then had to find a place to slap that into a story somewhere cuz he’s justice-impotent.
Again, the portrayal of women in general really exposes this author’s own implicit bias. I sincerely hope he doesn’t have a daughter. I don’t want to google it and find out. I’ll just hold on to hope.
The ending was lackluster. Really,
both Jude and the ghost should have died. Terrible, awful deaths. The only satisfying ending would have been Mary Beth riding off into the sunset, free of Jude and at peace with her freedom and ready to get some life experience so she doesn’t make the same mistakes shacking up with toxic cishet men again.

In the end, this would have been much better as a short story culminating in several bloody deaths across the board. This was NOT a satisfying read. It wasn’t triggering. It wasn’t disturbing. It was like reading a teenage boy’s post-SVU fantasy stretched thin like butter scraped over too much bread. Go elsewhere for your horror fix. This ain’t it. .5⭐️ for potential that was never realized.

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