A snowball survives in hell

Did you ever think you would ever read a decent horror novel again? Christ on his throne NO! and whoever would? Well, Joe Hill has managed quite a trick with his horror story Heart Shaped Box. Hill avoids so many of the pitfalls of the horror genre and shows at least one way to write an effective scary story.

The relative simplicity of the story allows Hill to concentrate on his characters. The main characters are Judas Coyne, an Ozzy Osbourne/Danzig like rocker, and his girlfriend Georgia. That isn't her real name, but he uses home states as a substitute for names with his women. Coyne, a collector of the morbid and ghoulish, buys a ghost, in the form of a haunted suit. It turns out the ghost isn't terribly friendly.

In many stories, once the horrific elements start they don't stop. One effect of this is to make them less shocking. In Hill's story, the ghost that haunts his main characters attacks and then retreats. The characters return to the everyday only to have the evil force reappear in surprising ways. His writing is clear, lucid and naturalistic which makes his ghost seem all the more believable.

Hill makes the story more horrific by using less violence and limiting its scope. The violence in many horror novels is so over the top that it becomes cartoonish. In the scariest books and films, the threat of violence is much more unbearable than the act itself. The ghost is a tormentor in addition to a killer and Hill uses this to good effect.

Finally, the book addresses actual themes such as addressing one's pasts, redeeming past failures and the surviving bad families. While this may seem like window dressing in a book that is meant to keep you up at night and listening closely for intruders, it reinforces the characters as real people and invests the reader in the story.

This is Hill's first novel, so there is hope for more horror novels worth reading.