[books 2011] Joe HIll

[inulro]

39. Horns by Joe Hill

Hill's first book, Heart Shaped Box, is one of my favourite horror novels of recent years. So it's kinda embarrassing that it's taken me this long to get around to reading the follow up.

I absolutely adored the first 90% of it - Ignatius (Ig) Perrish, dorky Christian do-gooder and town loser (despite having a famous father and brother) has been accused of raping & murdering his girlfriend. The case never went to trial, but the whole town (including his parents) think he did it. One day, a year after her death, he wakes up with horns, breathing smoke, able to hear people's thoughts, and everyone tells him things they would never tell anyone else.

It's not a straight-up horror story, though. The book also goes into the past to show how all the characters got to be where they are. It's about love, and loss, and finding out your best friend is a psychopath, and finding out who the good people really are.

As I said, I charged through the first 90% of it. I did not, however, love the end. The explanation of how Ig becomes the devil is lame, and one of the twists was just unecessary and also lame. Which is hard to balance against just how compelling and well-written the rest of the book is.

Comments

[naturalbornkaos.livejournal.com]

I really, really didn't get on with this book at all. I thought it was a total mess. The genre elements felt sandwiched very awkwardly into the rest of it - a kind of noirish small town murder potboiler - and the characters were all loathsome. I thought all of the "peering into people's minds" scenes were really trite, unimaginative and repetitive, the religious aspects were seriously jumbled up (it felt like he was trying to make some kind of point but completely failing) and there was an uncomfortable air of subtle misogyny to the whole thing that left a bad taste in my mouth.

I started off with some goodwill towards it because I like some of the stories in "20th Century Ghosts" but as the book went on, it just beat it out of me. By the end, I couldn't get it down the charity shop fast enough!

[inulro.livejournal.com]

My copy came from the library, so I didn't even have to think about what to do with it.

[ivory-goddess.livejournal.com]

I was unimpressed with Horns, which was disappointing as I loved both Heart Shaped Box and 20th Century Ghosts. I can't quite decide why I didn't like it, but it was the whole book that was the problem for me, not just the end.