|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2007 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
Heart-Shaped
Box by Joe Hill |
|||
|
Rating: |
*** |
|||
|
|
(Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Justice Joe Hill’s
debut novel, Heart-Shaped
Box, provides a suspenseful plot, creative writing, complex and
well-developed characters, and enough horror to make the pages turn quickly. One
of Hill’s skills that remains consistent throughout
the book is his restraint: there are ample times when his descriptions could
overflow, but through restraint, his writing becomes even more powerful. Here’s
an excerpt, all of Chapter 2, pp. 9-14: The suit came early Saturday morning. Jude was up and outside with the dogs. Angus lunged as soon as the
UPS truck ground to a halt, and the leash was yanked out of Jude’s hand.
Angus leaped against the side of the parked truck, spit flying, paws
scuffling furiously against the driver’s-side door. The driver remained
behind the wheel, peering down at him with the calm but intent expression of
a doctor considering a new strain of Ebola through a microscope. Jude caught
the leash and pulled on it, harder than he meant to. Angus sprawled on his
side in the dirt, then twisted and sprang hack up, snarling. By now Bon was
in on the act, straining at the end of her leash, which Jude held in his
other hand, and yapping with a shrillness that hurt his head. Because it was too far to
haul them all the way back to the barn and their pen, Jude dragged them
across the yard and up to the front porch, both of them fighting him the
whole time. He shoveled them in through the front door and slammed it behind
them. Immediately they set to flinging themselves against it, barking
hysterically. The door shuddered as they slammed into it. Fucking dogs. Jude shuffled
back down into the driveway, and reached the UPS truck just as the rear door
slid open with a steely clatter. The deliveryman stood inside. He hopped
down, holding a long, flat box under his arm. “Ozzy
Osbourne has Pomeranians,” the UPS guy said. “I saw
them on TV. Cute little dogs like house cats. You ever think about getting a
couple cute little dogs like that?” Jude took
the box without a word and went inside. He brought
the box through the house and into the kitchen. He put it on the counter and
poured coffee. Jude was an early riser by instinct and conditioning. When he
was on the road, or recording, he had become accustomed to rolling into bed
at five in the morning and sleeping through most of the daylight hours, but
staying up all night had never come naturally. On the road he would wake at
four in the afternoon, bad-tempered and headachy, confused about where the
time had gone. Everyone he knew would seem to him clever impostors, unfeeling
aliens wearing rubber skin and the faces of friends. It took a liberal
quantity of alcohol to make them seem like themselves again. Only it had been three
years since he’d last gone on tour. He didn’t have much interest in drinking
when he was home, and was ready for bed most nights by nine. At the age of fifty-four,
he had settled back into the rhythms that had guided him since his name was
Justin Cowzynski and he was a boy on his father’s
hog farm. The illiterate son of a bitch would have dragged him out of bed by
the hair if he’d found him in it when the sun came up. It was a childhood of
mud, barking dogs, barbed wire, dilapidated farm buildings, squealing pigs
with their flaking skin and squashed-in faces, and little human contact,
beyond a mother who sat most of the day at the kitchen table wearing the slack,
staring aspect of someone who had been lobotomized, and his father, who ruled
their acres of pig slit and ruin with his angry laughter and his fists. So Jude
had been up for several hours already but had not eaten breakfast yet, and he
was frying bacon when Jude had worked his way
through a collection of Goth girlfriends who stripped, or told fortunes, or
stripped and told fortunes, pretty
girls who wore ankhs and black fingernail polish, and whom he always called
by their state of origin, a habit few of them cared for, because they didn’t
like to be reminded of the person they were trying to erase with all their
living-dead makeup. She was twenty-three. “Goddam stupid dogs,” she said, shoving one of them out of
her way with her heel. They were whisking around Jude’s legs, excited by the
perfume of the bacon. ‘Woke me the fuck up.” “Maybe it was time to get
the fuck up. Ever think?” She never rose before ten if she could help it. She bent into the fridge
for the orange juice. He enjoyed the view, the way the straps of her
underwear cut into the almost-too-white cheeks of her ass, but he looked away
while she drank from the carton. She left it on the counter, too. It would
spoil there if he didn’t put it away for her. He was
glad for the adoration of the Goths. He appreciated the sex even more, their
limber, athletic, tattooed bodies and eagerness for kink. But he had been
married once, to a woman who used a glass and put things away when she was
done, who read the paper in the morning, and he missed their talk. It was
grown-up talk. She hadn’t been a stripper. She didn’t believe in
fortune-telling. It was grown-up companionship. “What’s
this?” she asked. A second box was contained
within the first. It was a tight fit, and “Is this
for me?” she asked. She pried the lid loose and
took out what was inside, lifting it for him to see. A suit. Someone had sent
him a suit. It was black and old-fashioned, the details blurred by the
plastic dry-cleaning bag pulled over it. He opened his mouth to tell
her he had no clue, but then instead heard himself say, “The dead man’s
suit.” “What?” “The ghost,” he said,
remembering as he spoke. “I bought a ghost. Some woman was convinced her
stepfather was haunting her. So she put his restless spirit up for sale on
the Internet, and I bought it for a grand. That’s his suit. She thinks it
might be the source of the haunting.” “Oh,
cool,” His own reaction surprised
him. His skin crawled, went rough and strange with gooseflesh. For one
unconsidered moment, the idea struck him as obscene. “No,” he said, and she
flicked a surprised glance at him, hearing something cold and flat in his
voice. Her smirk deepened a little, and he realized he had sounded.
.
. well, not frightened but
momentarily weak. He added, “It wouldn’t fit.” Although, in truth, it looked
as if the poltergeist had been about his height and weight in life. Again: a sensation of
revulsion, a crawling of the skin. She shouldn’t put it on. It unsettled him
that she would even joke about it, although he couldn’t have said why. He wasn’t
going to let her put it on. In that one instant, he could not imagine
anything more repellent. And that was saying
something. There wasn’t much that Jude found too distasteful to contemplate.
He was unused to feeling disgust. The profane didn’t trouble him; it had made
him a good living for thirty years. “I’ll stick it
upstairs until I figure out what to do with it,” he said, trying for a
dismissive tone-and not quite making it. She stared at him, interested at
this wavering of his usual self-possession, and then she pulled off the
plastic dry-cleaning bag. The coat’s silver buttons flashed in the light. The
suit was somber, as dark as crow feathers, but those buttons, the size of
quarters, gave it something of a rustic character. Add a string tie and it
was the sort of thing Johnny Cash might’ve worn onstage. Angus began to bark,
high, shrill, panicked harking. He shoved himself back on his haunches, tail
lowered, rearing away from the suit. “It is haunted,” she said. She held the suit in
front of her and waved it back and forth, walking it through the air toward
Angus, flapping it at him, a bullfighter with cape. She moaned as she closed
in on him, the throaty, drawn-out cry of a wandering haunt, while her eyes
gleamed with pleasure. Angus scrambled back,
hit a stool at the kitchen counter, and knocked it over with a ringing crash.
Bon stared out from beneath the old, bloodstained chopping block, ears
flattened against her skull. “Cut it the fuck out,”
Jude said. She shot him a snotty,
perversely happy look-the look of a child burning ants with a magnifying
glass-and then she made a face of pain and shouted. Swore and grabbed her
right hand. She flung the suit aside onto the counter. A bright drop of blood fattened
at the tip of her thumb and fell, plink,
onto the tiled floor. “Shit,” she said. “Fucking
pin.” “You see what you get.” She glared, flipped him the
bird, and stalked out. When she was gone, he got up and put the juice hack
into the fridge. Jude dropped the knife in the sink, got a hand towel to wipe
the blood off the floor-and then his gaze caught on the suit, and he forgot
whatever it was he’d been about to do. He smoothed it out, folded
the arms over the chest, felt carefully around. Jude couldn’t find any pins,
couldn’t figure out what she’d stuck herself on. He laid it gently back into
its box. An acrid odor caught his attention. He
glanced into the pan and cursed. The bacon was burnt. The novel is a
story of justice, and that spirit infuses the motivation of many characters.
I was attracted to Heart-Shaped
Box knowing that the author is Stephen King’s son, and I wanted to see if
he was any good as a writer. While there may not be a gene for writing. Joe
Hill does his parents proud in this debut novel, and any reader who enjoys a suspenseful,
scary novel, will appreciate the skill displayed on the pages of Heart-Shaped
Box. Steve Hopkins,
May 25, 2007 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the June 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Heart-Shaped
Box.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
