Book Review: Joe Hill's "Heart-Shaped Box"

In the mood for a dark ghost story? Look no further than Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box.

Judas Coyne (usually called Jude) is the protagonist in Hill's novel. Jude is an aging rocker, a heavy metal hero, who collects creepy and macabre artifacts. One is from a cop, a fan of Jude's, who sent the singer a snuff film collected from a crime scene. Books on voodoo, witchcraft and the dark arts also line his shelves, most given to Jude by his fans and followers.

One day his assistant alerts him to an unusual online auction: A woman is selling the ghost of her stepfather. Jude can't resist such an odd purchase, so he makes a bid. Soon, the dead man's suit, all black with silver buttons, arrives in a heart-shaped box, similar to ones Jude used to see as a child, when his abusive father would give his mother a box of chocolates in apology for beatings.

Soon Jude and his live-in girlfriend, Georgia (Jude tends to name his girls after their home states), start experiencing odd things. Georgia pricks her finger on a pin in the suit (a pin neither one can find) and it gets badly, disgustingly infected.

Jude walks the hallways of his home, and sees an old man in a black suit with silver buttons sitting in a chair. He's afraid to acknowledge the man, to make eye contact, the sight of him is so unsettling.

Soon, by accident, Jude looks at the old man and they make eye contact. Sort of. The old ghoul doesn't have normal eyes, but blackened areas in place of the eyes, alive with sinister movement.

The eyes are not the only eerie thing about the old man, whose name is Craddock. Jude learns he didn't buy a merely a suit and a ghost, but a whole lot of sorrow and terror. And that ghost was pitched to him for a reason.

From there, Jude and Georgia try to resolve the situation. How do they get rid of the ghost? Along the way, Hill leaps back and forth into the characters' pasts: Georgia as a molested teen. Jude as a youth, feeling his the impact of his dad's fists and watching his mother become a victim of the father's rages.

Old girlfriends and connections to Jude's past as well as his present dilemma are revealed.

Hill's novel is creepy, with interesting, yet flawed characters, with a good sense of place (much of it in the American South) and it moves at a good clip.

Ultimately we end up on a road trip, figuratively, to the past for answers, and literally, in the present for a resolution.

Heart-Shaped Box can be purchased on www.amazon.com