Heart-Shaped Box

Heart-Shaped Box is Joe Hill's 2007 debut novel, the horror book that established Hill as one of the strongest contemporary horror writers and as a major writer in his own right rather than "Stephen King's son writing under a pen name." Judas Coyne, an aging metal star living in upstate New York with his current twenty-something girlfriend, has a collection of macabre artifacts. He buys a ghost on the internet (the seller claims the suit belonged to her late stepfather, who is haunting it). The ghost arrives in a heart-shaped box. The ghost is real, and the ghost wants Judas Coyne dead.

Hill's project here is the kind of patient setup-and-escalation that the best contemporary horror demonstrates. The first hundred pages establish Coyne as a fully realized aging-rock-star protagonist (the road life he has retired from, the long string of disposable girlfriends he is starting to reckon with, the daughter he has not spoken to in years). The middle third escalates through a road trip from upstate New York to Florida as Coyne and Marybeth (his current girlfriend) try to outrun the ghost. The third-act reveal about Marybeth's past and her own connection to the dead stepfather earns the surprise.

Recommended as required contemporary horror reading, as the right Joe Hill entry point, and for fans of Peter Straub's Ghost Story, Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes, and Stephen King's Bag of Bones who want a contemporary horror novel that takes its setup seriously. Four solid stars and the start of a career worth following. The Stephen Lang audiobook is the definitive audio production.