Heart-Shaped Box, book review. (Joe Hill)

It's been a while since I read a true horror book, and now I've gone and read two in quick succession.

If the word horror scares you, or you've never read the genre before, don't worry, because unlike the bloodbaths of old, the slasher books of the 70's and 80's, (which made this author's father rather famous), the horror books of today are more subtle; this book being a good case in point.

Set in the US of A, we have an ageing rock star, Judas Coyne, (stage name), his Gothic girlfriend, Georgia, a ghost, and the sister of Coyne's dead girlfriend, who's out for revenge.

Coyne, is not only a rock star, but a collector, a collector of the strange, the weird, the eclectic, so when a ghost is offered for sale on an auction website, he just has to purchase it. When an old suit arrives a few days later, and Jude sees the ghost that he purchased, casually sitting in a chair in his hallway, things begin to fall apart.

You'd think the fact that the ghost was real would be enough, but when the ghost speaks to him, tries to control him, Coyne starts to investigate, and soon finds out that the man in life, was his dead girlfriend's step-father, and then, the journey really begins.

Coyne and Georgia hit the road. They're going in search of the dead girlfriend's sister, (the woman who sold him the ghost), and there's Ouija boards, guns, cars crashes, cut-throat razors, dogs, the constant presence of the spectre and more, and it's all rather good.

There are parts of this book that are genuinely spooky, it has a creepiness that I felt wasn't overdone, and a ghost that felt genuinely scary. There's the mad, full on, all guns blazing, inter-spliced with the cold, dead of night, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-head spooky, and it all balances out rather nicely.

What I didn't like was the fact that all the female characters seemed to have been molested as children, and that Coyne's ex-wife hadn't dispose of his illegal video when she'd found it - and when I say illegal, I mean chuck you in gaol and throw away the key illegal, which surely any rational person would have done.

So, taking all of the above into consideration, Heart-Shaped Box has its ups and its downs but gets a solid three stars; which isn't bad for a debut novel.