Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill, 2007

Gushing reviews led me to order this for the library, and I finally got around to reading it. Joe Hill is Stephen King's son, and the buzz was that he'd matched his dad's horror ability in a totally different voice. True, and it's a satisfactory novel, though not one I'd re-read. The premise--a rock star who collects the macabre buys a haunted suit on the Internet and can't get rid of the ghost--is good, the characters believable, and the plot ties up nicely. Hill writes well and doesn't display any of King's faults, but he lacks a little bit of King's compelling narrative drive.

I'd completely forgotten the title is drawn from a Nirvana song--it's a very evocative phrase on its own.