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A review by lethaldose
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
3.0
A good, but not quite great, debut novel. I kind of understand why Joe Hill chose to not advertise at first that he was Stephen King's son, because I knew it going in and I could not help but compare the two. I will resist the temptation to do that here, but I would be lying if I said there weren't some very distinctly similarities to their story telling style.
It is a very easy book to read that is a big plus, the chapters are laid out in the style of mostly short covering the immediate event, so all most all of them respresent a good and natural stopping point while reading.
The story is good, the ghost of a dead man purchased through a suit to exact revenge on an aging metalhead. I loved it as a concept and as an actual plot it was great too. There are some twists and turns along the bunny trail that make it a satisfying story all the way until the end. Some you will have guess, most of the rest won't exactly be surprising, but will be interesting. The actual events within the story happen over just a couple of days and the book starts relaxed enough but quickly builds to a frenzied pace that it maintains almost throughout the rest of the book. Does the ending make sense? Well, not really and the story gets a bit jumbled at the climax and it is a little hard to stay grounded in what is going on, but you get the gist of it. And I actually enjoyed the wrap up afterwards, it was very satisfying.
The characters are the weak point of the story, they are believable, they are interesting, somewhat. The two women of Judas Coyne present and past are a bit cliched and boring, but Judas himself and Craddock are very interesting. But not exactly likeable, and that was a hard part for me. This is suppose to be a story of redemption, but it never really felt like that, I didn't feel like Judas was very horrible at the beginning and I didn't feel like he changed much by the end. He was upset to learn about his ex-girlfriends death early on and he was still upset at the end. And he came to the conclusion to sacrifice himself to save his girlfriend early on in the novel, not towards the end. He was a character whose moral compass was just a little off to start with and events quickly nudged it into true, and it stayed there, not really the redemption story I thought I was getting. Craddock was suppose to represent the opposite and his character is a bit better done, and very cleverly. Since he is dead and a ghost it isn't about his character changing, but Joe Hill does a magnificent job of shifting your perspective as reader so your opinion of him and interpretation of what he is doing changes. For the book to work right your opinion is suppose to view Judas and the bad guy and Craddock as the good guy with rightful vengenance, as the book moves forward you are suppose to change views of them and they are suppose to change places, it never really works like that, it was ambitious, but it falls very short of that.
Still the book was entertaining, I am not sold on Joe Hill being the new voice of horror, but I will certainly give a few more of his books a read, he is a very talented writer and will only get better.
It is a very easy book to read that is a big plus, the chapters are laid out in the style of mostly short covering the immediate event, so all most all of them respresent a good and natural stopping point while reading.
The story is good, the ghost of a dead man purchased through a suit to exact revenge on an aging metalhead. I loved it as a concept and as an actual plot it was great too. There are some twists and turns along the bunny trail that make it a satisfying story all the way until the end. Some you will have guess, most of the rest won't exactly be surprising, but will be interesting. The actual events within the story happen over just a couple of days and the book starts relaxed enough but quickly builds to a frenzied pace that it maintains almost throughout the rest of the book. Does the ending make sense? Well, not really and the story gets a bit jumbled at the climax and it is a little hard to stay grounded in what is going on, but you get the gist of it. And I actually enjoyed the wrap up afterwards, it was very satisfying.
The characters are the weak point of the story, they are believable, they are interesting, somewhat. The two women of Judas Coyne present and past are a bit cliched and boring, but Judas himself and Craddock are very interesting. But not exactly likeable, and that was a hard part for me. This is suppose to be a story of redemption, but it never really felt like that, I didn't feel like Judas was very horrible at the beginning and I didn't feel like he changed much by the end. He was upset to learn about his ex-girlfriends death early on and he was still upset at the end. And he came to the conclusion to sacrifice himself to save his girlfriend early on in the novel, not towards the end. He was a character whose moral compass was just a little off to start with and events quickly nudged it into true, and it stayed there, not really the redemption story I thought I was getting. Craddock was suppose to represent the opposite and his character is a bit better done, and very cleverly. Since he is dead and a ghost it isn't about his character changing, but Joe Hill does a magnificent job of shifting your perspective as reader so your opinion of him and interpretation of what he is doing changes. For the book to work right your opinion is suppose to view Judas and the bad guy and Craddock as the good guy with rightful vengenance, as the book moves forward you are suppose to change views of them and they are suppose to change places, it never really works like that, it was ambitious, but it falls very short of that.
Still the book was entertaining, I am not sold on Joe Hill being the new voice of horror, but I will certainly give a few more of his books a read, he is a very talented writer and will only get better.