Reviews with content warning for Suicide attempt - Heart-Shaped Box

Reviews tagging 'Suicide attempt'

haiwie's review

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Main character is insufferable and had too many suicidal themes, couldn’t do it anymore

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gellyreads's review

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adventurous dark tense fast-paced

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

4.0

I really loved this novel's depiction and imagery of ghosts (the blackout eyes is super haunting and creepy). I also found one scene in this to be fairly disturbing and will make me hesitate to recommend this to anyone. Not to mention the other dark material that is covered in this book.

This book heavily features child abuse, molestation, grooming, age gap relationships, and the dark scene in question involves adults but a mix of sex and violence in a way that made me have to put the book down and walk away it was so disturbing

The ending both did and didn't feel desired, and the "familiars" idea I feel like could've been dealt with more. But I had a lot of fun reading this one and am excited to read more of Hill's work.

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poptartsicle's review

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dark emotional mysterious tense fast-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

4.5

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mx_harpstar's review

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I like an antihero but this main character was too misogynistic for me to get past. Might give it another shot later.

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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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morganpearcy's review

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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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stephanieluxton's review against another edition

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dark sad 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

This book really isn't what I thought it'd be. I didn't find it scary but I did find it reasonably stressful. It's essentially about a man who becomes haunted by a ghost and sets out to uncover the truth about the haunting and find a way to free himself of it. There's some really excellent character development and I do like the story unfolded in a way I didn't expect. The story had a medium pace. I think it would have been better if it was either a fast paced thriller or if it was more of a slow burn horror that built a sense of dread. The second half of the book is better than the first!

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