The hero of Heart-Shaped Box is Jude Coyne, a middle-aged metal-rock star with a fascination for the morbid which shows itself, not only in his music, but also in his collection of creepy curios. Waiting with a gleaming razor blade on a chain dangling from one bony hand.Ī multiple-award winner for his short fiction, author Joe Hill immediately vaults into the top echelon of dark fantasists with a blood-chilling roller-coaster ride of a novel, a masterwork brimming with relentless thrills and acid terror. It's the real thing.Īnd suddenly the suit's previous owner is everywhere: behind the bedroom ated in Jude's restored vintage Mustang.standing outside his window.staring out from his widescreen TV. What's one more?īut what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no imaginary or metaphorical ghost, no benign conversation piece.

He has spent a lifetime coping with ghosts of an abusive father, of the lovers he callously abandoned, of the bandmates he betrayed. I will 'sell' my stepfather's ghost to the highest bidder.įor a thousand dollars, Jude will become the proud owner of a dead man's suit, said to be haunted by a restless spirit. But nothing he possesses is as unlikely or as dreadful as his latest discovery, an item for sale on the Internet, a thing so terribly strange, Jude can't help but reach for his wallet. An aging death-metal rock god, his taste for the unnatural is as widely known to his legions of fans as the notorious excesses of his youth.

Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre: a cookbook for cannibals.a used hangman's noose.a snuff film.

Heart shaped box book review