Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

I first picked this book up many, many months ago, sucked in by the intriguing blurb and the general good things I'd heard. It then sat on my Kindle until a couple of weeks ago when we got the physical book into my workplace and I was reminded of its existence. I then found out Joe Hill is Stephen King's son and that cemented it. I was going to read this book.

Those of you who have read my Gerald's Game review will know that books don't scare me easily. While I am a complete wuss when it comes to horror movies, books have a harder job. I adore Stephen King but I would say that only one of his books has ever scared me. Maybe I should have been reading his son this whole time instead.

Heart-Shaped Box terrified me. It is ultimately a ghost story and it probably isn't as original as it seemed to me, but something about this elderly ghost relentless hunting down the main character and trying to drive him to suicide got into my head in the way few books do. This book has all the intensity of a Stephen King book but it is streamlined. There is little of the character and narrative quirks that plague King stories, and the result is a very extreme and relentless experience. I think the best part is you genuinely have no idea if the main character will survive or not. There is none of the security that comes from protagonist immunity and I love it for that.

I can't say much more about this book without spoilers sadly, but there are just a few more points I wanted to add. The characters are very complex and grey in their morality, and this is handled very well within the story. You don't dislike them by any means but you're not sure you always agree with them either. There is only one sexual moment that I can think of which makes this a great book to choose if the sex elements in horror stories normally bother you. Finally, the middle of the book does change the tone a little and not really for the better. However, it soon returns back to the scary atmosphere of the earlier sections and it does end very strongly.

If you are a fan of horror, I strongly urge you to pick this book up. It is one of the best examples of how to successfully create an atmosphere and I promise you won't regret it.

Overall Rating:

.5