This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Affiliate, I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. Read the full disclaimer here.
Joe Hill published Heart-Shaped Box in 2007 under his own name, having spent years concealing that he was Stephen King’s son specifically so his work would be judged on its own merits. Having read it, the concealment seems almost unnecessary — Heart-Shaped Box is good enough to stand without any family context whatsoever.
It is also, genuinely, one of the most frightening ghost stories published in the last two decades.
What’s It About?
Judas Coyne is an ageing heavy metal rock star — one of the genuine legends, now well past his commercial peak, living on a rural estate with his young girlfriend (referred to only by the state she came from: Georgia) and a collection of the macabre. He buys a ghost online. A dead man’s suit, auctioned on a website, with a ghost included. He buys it as a joke.
The ghost is real. It belongs to a man who had a specific reason to hate Judas and has been sent deliberately. And it is terrifying.
The Ghost
Hill constructs his ghost with real imagination. Craddock McDermott doesn’t rattle chains or bleed from the walls. He’s a presence — a dead man in a black suit with scribbles where his eyes should be, sitting in chairs in Judas’ peripheral vision, standing at the end of hallways. His power is psychological and cumulative, and Hill builds the dread with precision.
The visual design of the haunting — those scribbled-out eyes, the way Craddock moves, the black flies that accompany him — is among the most original in recent horror fiction. This is not your grandmother’s ghost story.
Judas
The other thing that distinguishes Heart-Shaped Box from lesser horror novels is its protagonist. Judas Coyne is not a sympathetic man. He collects gothic curiosities. He dates young women from troubled backgrounds, calls them all by their state names, and discards them when he’s done. He has treated people badly for a long time.
Hill makes us care about him anyway, which is a considerable achievement. The novel is partly about Judas being forced to reckon with his own behaviour — to see himself as others have seen him — and the horror is the mechanism for that reckoning. By the time the road-trip section of the book kicks in, Judas has become someone worth following.
Georgia
The girlfriend is the book’s best character. Georgia starts as the kind of character that appears in horror novels to be threatened and screamed and gets off the bus around page 100 into something considerably more interesting. Hill writes her with a specificity and warmth that makes their relationship feel real, and the evolution of that relationship across the novel provides the emotional arc that the horror plot hangs on.
The Road Trip
The second act turns into a pursuit — Judas and Georgia on the road, trying to understand the ghost and find a way to fight it. This section is where the novel moves from being a very good haunted house story to something with more ambition. It broadens the backstory, deepens the mythology, and gives Judas the opportunity to make different choices than the ones that defined his previous decades.
It’s well done.
Should You Read It?
If you like horror — yes, without reservation. If you want to try horror and want a genuinely compelling entry point with a strong character arc alongside the scares — also yes. It’s one of those rare horror novels that works on multiple levels simultaneously.
Hill has since published NOS4A2, The Fireman, and the Locke and Key graphic novel series, all of which are worth reading. But Heart-Shaped Box is where to start.
Rating: 4.5/5
Rated 4.3 Stars on Amazon. Buy Heart-Shaped Box here.
You Might Also Like
- IT by Stephen King Review
- Last Days by Adam Nevill Review
- Floating Dragon by Peter Straub Review
- Stephen King Books in Order
Check out Sunset In the East — a mind-bending short story collection from Ben Luxon.
