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A review by trin
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
3.0
Aging rock star Judas Coyne (surprise twist! not his real name), a collector of strange and macabre items, learns about a ghost up for sale on an "eBay knockoff" and decides he has to have it. The ghost is transported to him via the dead man's suit, wrapped in a heart-shaped box, and almost immediately Jude begins to experience buyer's remorse.
The beginning of this book—the first hundred pages or so—was truly frightening to me. A secret: vampires, werewolves, mummies, sea monsters, demons, zombies, killer clowns—these things don't scare me. Ghosts scare me. They don't even have to do anything: there's just something about them, intangible but there, watching, that scares the crap out of me. So this book freaked me out the most—in that wonderful, shivery, brrr kind of way—when the ghost wasn't doing anything, when it was just sitting in Jude's hallway, its hat in its hand, two mad, black scribbles where its eyes should be.
Then the plot happened. See, there's a reason Jude came to find out about this particular auction; Jude's ex-girlfriend's family is blah blah blah...okay: all of this is actually pretty interesting. The action did lag in the middle, when there were just a lot of instances in a row of the ghost trying to convince Jude and Jude's new girlfriend, Georgia, to kill themselves, but it does pick up again, and the whole book is generally captivating. However, as soon as the plot engages, the book stops being scary. At least to me: once its motivations are explained, the ghost became a creepy dude out for revenge, and a lot of the otherworldliness, the inexplicableness, went away, and with it the scary. There were still things I enjoyed: Jude and Georgia are both interesting, flawed characters, and I liked how their relationship developed; I even liked the slightly unrealistic ending. (It made me happy, okay? I'm a sap; shut up.) But the book lost something for me when it stopped being frightening, and devolved from something creepy and unusual to something much more done, almost an ordinary, average horror/thriller. So it's a good novel, yeah, but not a great one; I really do wish Hill's spark of originality could have burned a little bit longer. Maybe in the next one.
The beginning of this book—the first hundred pages or so—was truly frightening to me. A secret: vampires, werewolves, mummies, sea monsters, demons, zombies, killer clowns—these things don't scare me. Ghosts scare me. They don't even have to do anything: there's just something about them, intangible but there, watching, that scares the crap out of me. So this book freaked me out the most—in that wonderful, shivery, brrr kind of way—when the ghost wasn't doing anything, when it was just sitting in Jude's hallway, its hat in its hand, two mad, black scribbles where its eyes should be.
Then the plot happened. See, there's a reason Jude came to find out about this particular auction; Jude's ex-girlfriend's family is blah blah blah...okay: all of this is actually pretty interesting. The action did lag in the middle, when there were just a lot of instances in a row of the ghost trying to convince Jude and Jude's new girlfriend, Georgia, to kill themselves, but it does pick up again, and the whole book is generally captivating. However, as soon as the plot engages, the book stops being scary. At least to me: once its motivations are explained, the ghost became a creepy dude out for revenge, and a lot of the otherworldliness, the inexplicableness, went away, and with it the scary. There were still things I enjoyed: Jude and Georgia are both interesting, flawed characters, and I liked how their relationship developed; I even liked the slightly unrealistic ending. (It made me happy, okay? I'm a sap; shut up.) But the book lost something for me when it stopped being frightening, and devolved from something creepy and unusual to something much more done, almost an ordinary, average horror/thriller. So it's a good novel, yeah, but not a great one; I really do wish Hill's spark of originality could have burned a little bit longer. Maybe in the next one.