When Joe Hill's first collection of short stories entitled 20th Century Ghosts appeared in 2005 its content netted the author a Crawford Award, a Bram Stoker Award and a British Fantasy Award. At first glance, his debut novel Heart-Shaped Box is an accessible ghost story full of deliciously creepy set pieces and draped in the kind of Southern gothic that has fed many of America's finest horror films over the last thirty years. However, beneath the Rock references and the unadorned prose, lies a ghost story that draws just as heavily from the classics of horror literature as it does from horror cinema. Indeed, Hill understands, as James, Lovecraft and Poe did before him that sometimes a ghost is not just a ghost... particularly when the author's father is one of the most widely read horror authors of all time.
Judas Coyne is a middle-aged rock star. Once able to fill stadiums with adoring fans he now struggles to fill his days as he potters about his house toying with his muscle car, his flatteringly young girlfriend and his collection of weird objects (such as a hangman's noose and a witch's confession). This is until his assistant suggests that he buy a ghost over the Internet. Hoping to add to his ghoulish collection, Judas jumps at the chance to own a ghost only to realise too late that his purchase of the ghost was no chance encounter. In fact, the ghost Judas Coyne has just purchased is the stepfather of an old girlfriend who apparently committed suicide after being cast aside. A ghost who now wants to see Judas kill himself as well as the people he cares about most. A ghost who was once an expert in psychological warfare. After coming damn close to blowing his brains out, Coyne and his girlfriend Georgia set off across country in the hope of confronting the woman who sold Judas his ghost. However, when Judas Coyne finally returns to the South he finds more questions than answers... particularly questions about himself and his own relationship with his father.
Heart-Shaped Box is one of the most heavily hyped debut novels to appear in recent years. With American publisher Harper Collins leaking rumours and previews as early as October and British publisher Gollancz promising blanket genre and mainstream press coverage as well as a "stealth PR campaign", it would seem that the publishers think they are on to a winner with this one. In fact, Harper Collins have even gone so far as to commission a screenplay based upon the book.
The cynical among us might suggest that the reason for this is that Joe Hill is actually the pen name of Joseph Hillstrom King, son of novelist Tabitha King and plutonium-fuelled god of horror Stephen King. However, before you sneer it is worth noting that this fact is not mentioned anywhere on Hill's website or the book's publicity material. In fact, Hill's career trajectory seems to be precisely that which you would expect from a first time novelist and he seems to have gone to some length to avoid what I am about to do now... namely compare him to his father.
Heart-Shaped Box is written in a style that is cosmetically very similar to that of King. King narrates in a simple and informal manner accentuated by his tendency to infuse the narration with the thought processes of his frequently blue-collar protagonists. Hill's prose style is similarly unadorned and dialogue heavy, the uneducated vocabularies and thought patterns of Judas and Georgia making for an incredibly accessible and easy to read style that makes the pages just flow by.
Stylistically, Hill clearly draws from two different approaches to horror. Firstly, Heart-Shaped Box is a book very much concerned with the visual and the visible, Hill's descriptions are overwhelmingly about what the characters see and the plot is advanced by above-board scenes and set-pieces rather than any of the characters reaching a conclusion at the end of a train of thought. In particular, it is worth pointing out the staggeringly emotional scene in which Judas confronts the family of his ex girlfriend as well as the moment when Judas' assistant calls him from the other side, the mundane nature of the means of communication as eerie as the glimpse of the afterlife it affords Judas. Indeed, with this approach to story telling, it is little surprise that the wheels are in motion to make a film out of Heart-Shaped Box. However, much as Hill is clearly influenced by American cinematic horror, he is just as clearly influenced by the kinds of traditional ghost stories once written by MR James or Edgar Allen Poe and later reinvented by HP Lovecraft. For just as Heart-Shaped Box is a fun and thrilling ghost story, it is also an exploration of a state of psychological dysfunction... of pathological fucked-upedness. The question readers need to ask themselves... is how deep that pathology goes.
Arguably one of the most potent wellsprings of American Horror (particularly of the cinematic variety) is the Mason-Dixon line. That old point of demarcation between the so-called free states and the slave-owning states, the point below which civilised Americans become savages. From Deliverance (1972) to The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and even The Skeleton Key (2005), American horror has again and again featured the idea that the Southern States are uncivilised. In fact, this characterisation has become such a cliché that it is even now difficult for a non-American to think of going to the South without images of grotesque backward murderers and incestuous rapists springing to mind. There are a number of interpretations for this fixation from the Freudian idea that the American South is the nation's raw pulsating racist and corrupt id while the North is the authoritarian and unforgiving superego, to the Marxist idea that this is all about the urban middle classes and their fear of the rural poor. Whichever way one chooses to interpret this fear, whichever theory one proposes to explain it away, the fact is that that fear was tangible when films such as Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) and I Spit on your Grave (1978) were made. One reason why the fear was so tangible is that the 1960's and 1970's were a time of great social unease and division for America as the liberal, educated children of the post-war Generation stood confronted by the entrenched reactionary beliefs of the generations that came before. Then, as now, America stood divided (in fact, one could suggest that one reason that horror films and particularly horror remakes are so popular is because of the divisive nature of US politics at the moment). By choosing to cloak his book in the kind of atmospheric Southern Gothic that enfolds many of those old films, Hill is not only making his influences clear, he is also engaging with the society from which he was issued. Indeed, Judas Coyne is a Southern Boy but he is also one who has chosen to turn his back on his family and history in the South in order to take to the road as the artificial Judas Coyne. In fact, Coyne's relation to the South is as much a part of what this book is about as his relationship with his father as Hill cleverly subverts the cliché to create in Judas Coyne, a man who is an Other to himself because he has tried to leave the South behind.
Routinely abused and degraded by his father, Coyne left home at an early age. However, before leaving, Judas never confronted his father about the years of abuse that his mother and he had to deal with. In fact, in one telling moment, a young Judas told his father that he loved him, just to keep things on an even keel and quiet. As a result of this act of betrayal both of himself and his (largely absent) mother, Coyne enters a state of arrested development; abandoning his real name and taking to the road, spending his life collecting toys and young girlfriends that he misogynistically dehumanises by only ever referring to them not by their names but by their state of origin. As the book progresses we learn that Judas' (a fitting name) acts of betrayal are not limited to him but to everyone he loves from his closest friends to his lovers when they needed him most. In the great traditions of ghost stories everywhere, Coyne's ghost is not just an angry spirit but also a materialisation of all of Coyne's secret fears and horrors. Coyne's insecurities about the way he has treated friends and lovers initially makes him susceptible to the ghost's whisperings. However, as time wears on, it becomes abundantly clear that Judas's problem is his own father and how his failure to confront his abuser has forced him to live the life of a stage persona rather than a real person. Nowhere is this meaning clearer than in the book's two climaxes where Judas first learns the ghost's real motivations (therefore allowing him to realise that his most important act of betrayal was towards himself) and then physically confronts the ghost who has taken possession of the body of Judas' own father. This subtext also invites a number of inevitable questions about the author's motivations for choosing to write about such themes.
Judas Coyne is a man who works under a pseudonym in the hope of getting out of the shadow of his father. The horror writer Joe Hill is horror writer Stephen King's son Joseph Hillstrom King. This poses an interesting question of any critics approaching his work since King has been famous since the 1970's and has spoken quite freely about a drink problem that coincided with Hill's childhood. In most cases, there simply is not enough evidence to support speculation about an author's motivations and even when there is evidence, it seems as though a line is being stepped over. Indeed, when Nigel Kneale wrote in an introduction to the Folio Society collection of MR James' short stories that the story "Whistle and I'll Come to You my Lad" was all about James' struggles with homosexual urges, he enraged James' fans despite the man himself being long dead. I will not engage is such speculation but I would encourage future interviewers to at least ask Hill about any anger he might feel towards his father... if only to prevent such idle speculation coming to form the consensus as to what the book is really all about.
Combining well-executed and creepy moments of horror with a very traditional message about the things that haunt us most being our own actions, Heart-Shaped Box is an intelligent and compelling read that delivers exactly what it promises on the tin. However, my problem with the book is that it delivers a good ghost story in the tradition of a number of great authors and little else. Indeed, what strikes me most about Heart-Shaped Box is how exactingly it sticks to demands of the genre in which it operates. Critics such as Farah Mendlesohn have argued that genre is a conversation between the producers of a genre and the people who read it, are influenced by it and then produce the next generation of it. This means that as time goes by, the nature and concerns of a genre evolve as wave after wave of writers adapt, rework and react to the ideas of writers that have come before. The problem with Heart-Shaped Box is that it seems to be conducting a conversation partly with the horror writers of a century or so ago and partly with popular horror films. My issue with the book is that the conversation is not very interesting... Hill has little to say about ghost stories or horror; he is just pretty good at turning out examples of it. In effect, Hill occupies the same patch of theoretical land as many fantasy writers; he's weird enough to provide escapism and yet not challenging enough to make reading his work anything other than comfortable and familiar like an old pair of slippers. Hill has the full support of his publishers and will doubtless do well as a novelist; I simply hope that his next novel is a little more ambitious.
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