Heart Shaped Box **

By Joe Hill.
Published by Harper Paperbacks  2009.
400 pages.

This is a fun, but silly little book.  I guess it's a best seller, though I generally don't read mass media best sellers.  This is a horror book.  Specifically, it is a ghost story.  Since I generally don't read this genre, I have no point of reference of how it compares to other books of its ilk.  This was nothing special.  I wonder how less well received books are.  Maybe they are just plain silly.  This at least was well paced and the characters were well drawn.

An aging death metal rock star, who had a hobby of collecting morbid artifacts found himself in possession of a suit of a recently dead man, who was now a ghost.  The ghost had started to haunt him.  Some of these scenes were pretty creepy.  Being a rock star, he has a goth girlfriend.  She's one of many, but since she's around when the haunting and terror starts, she becomes very close to him and him to her.  Apparently the ghost is haunting him because our hero had an old girlfriend who was mentally unstable and killed herself after the break up.  The ghost is the stepfather of the dead girl and is out to revenge his stepdaughter's death.  There are the requisite twists and the journey into other, after life worlds (an especially silly part), but it turns out the rock star hero isn't so bad at all.  He wasn't the cause of the suicide etc, and the ghost tried to kill him for fear of our hero interfering in the sordid lifestyle he had had previously with his stepdaughters.

I think one interesting idea is the presentation of the metal rock life style.    In real life, most mainstream people tend to fear people who dress in leather and all that other paraphernalia that rockers wear. This book does show these people as real feeling and sensitive people.  It shows the home life and consequent problems that they often have endured.  The thesis here is that most metal heads/ punk rockers are the way they are because of their dysfunctional family life in which they grew up.  A thesis I don't necessarily agree with.

Here's an interview with the author, who by the way is the son of Stephen King.