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A review by courtneydoss
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
2.0
Recently, I've been feeling like reading more horror, and Heart-Shaped Box was one of the highest recommended, non-Stephen-King books that I could find. It appeared time and time again on internet lists for books that transcended the barrier of the written word and legitimately scared the reader. I was pumped. Which is why this book was so disappointing. Sure, a lot of the descriptions were creepy, but I wasn't necessarily scared. I was looking for skin-crawly, keep you up at night horror, and this wasn't it.
Heart-Shaped Box is the story of aging rock-and-roller Judas Coyne, who purchases a ghost from an online store on a morbid whim. Obsessed with all things macabre, Jude orders the haunted suit and promptly forgets about it, but when it arrives he instantly knows something is off about it. As it turns out, the suit really is haunted, and the ghost that inhabits it is hell-bent on destroying Jude...and is willing to take down anybody else that gets in the way.
The imagery in this novel is pretty awesome. The descriptions of the ghost are particularly heebie jeebie, and although I think that the fear factor is greatly diminished later on in the book, the initial encounters with the ghost are really creepy. I think that the premise of this story is pretty strong, but it suffers from curse of over-explanation. What makes a book or movie truly terrifying is the unknown, and the nature of Jude's haunting is explained pretty early on. The reader learns early on what the exact limits of the haunting are, and so there is none of the tension that comes with the unknown.
Jude as a character starts out pretty unlikable, as far as I'm concerned, and the book comes across as a very masculine sort of novel. You can tell the difference between a novel written by a woman and a novel written by a man, and this was a quintessential boy's book. The character was tough and had the emotional range of a pitch pipe. His relationships with former girlfriend Anna "Florida" and current girlfriend Marybeth "Georgia" were both the toxic, and he was a total dick, if I'm being honest. He did pull it together a bit toward the end, but it didn't change the fact that he started out as an ass.
This wasn't the worst horror book I've ever read, but I think that it missed the mark when it comes to horror. For that reason, I gave it two stars.
Heart-Shaped Box is the story of aging rock-and-roller Judas Coyne, who purchases a ghost from an online store on a morbid whim. Obsessed with all things macabre, Jude orders the haunted suit and promptly forgets about it, but when it arrives he instantly knows something is off about it. As it turns out, the suit really is haunted, and the ghost that inhabits it is hell-bent on destroying Jude...and is willing to take down anybody else that gets in the way.
The imagery in this novel is pretty awesome. The descriptions of the ghost are particularly heebie jeebie, and although I think that the fear factor is greatly diminished later on in the book, the initial encounters with the ghost are really creepy. I think that the premise of this story is pretty strong, but it suffers from curse of over-explanation. What makes a book or movie truly terrifying is the unknown, and the nature of Jude's haunting is explained pretty early on. The reader learns early on what the exact limits of the haunting are, and so there is none of the tension that comes with the unknown.
Jude as a character starts out pretty unlikable, as far as I'm concerned, and the book comes across as a very masculine sort of novel. You can tell the difference between a novel written by a woman and a novel written by a man, and this was a quintessential boy's book. The character was tough and had the emotional range of a pitch pipe. His relationships with former girlfriend Anna "Florida" and current girlfriend Marybeth "Georgia" were both the toxic, and he was a total dick, if I'm being honest. He did pull it together a bit toward the end, but it didn't change the fact that he started out as an ass.
This wasn't the worst horror book I've ever read, but I think that it missed the mark when it comes to horror. For that reason, I gave it two stars.