dejaelizabeth 's review for:

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

3.75

adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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Yeah, I'm not really sure about this one. It started with a very interesting premise- what if someone bought a ghost on a bidding site and it actually started haunting them? Then, the idea was given a bit of a twist, what if that ghost was sent intentionally by someone who wanted revenge? I liked these ideas and initially I was bought in and engaged. Hill is a skilled writer, and although the characters weren't totally loveable off the bat, they grew on me a bit. Like his daddy, Hill can't resist unraveling a bit of daddy trauma throughout the story, as we learn about the main character, Rockstar Jude, his childhood, his rise to fame, and his tumultuous relationships with those who surround him throughout his life. This was okay, but what really struck me about this book is how little of it revolves around the interesting premise presented. We rarely see the ghost he bought. His hauntings are rare- and are either him just talking to Jude through the phone/ radio, standing around, or giving Jude nightmarish visions. Jude, his dogs

(which as soon as they were introduced I was preparing for them to die)

, and his  current girlfriend run around the house scared of him for while, then they take off on a roadtrip. The plot meanders and becomes a bit of a romance sprinkled with lacklaster hauntings. Then, there's a third twist on the premise. Jude believes he is being haunted by the stepfather of a former lover who killed herself as a form of revenge.

Then we learn she didn't commit suicide and she was actually murdered by her pedophile stepdad for wanting to turn him in. But for me, that ruins the tension of the previous premise. The ghost is now no longer sent as revenge.

There is a very interesting third act occurrence where Jude

is forced to fight his dying father who has been possesed by the ghost, effectively facing his childhood trauma head on. But honestly, as they were fighting, I was amazed we still weren't getting a more ghostly or supernatural climax. A whole book about a ghost and he's only scary a few times.

I'm not sure I'll be picking up A Hill book for a while. There's a lot of potential and good ideas in his works, but they seem the suffer from being underlyingly boring while attempting complexity.