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.

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