A biker gang is hunted by a trucker with a vendetta... a brother and sister follow a child's call for help into a field of tall grass that
is less benign than it appears... a girl in the future rents an artificial friend to salvage a terrible birthday... a ruthless corporate
"woodcutter" on an English train finds himself seated across from a wolf in a business suit... news of an "event" halfway around the world
changes everything for the passengers of a commercial jet over the middle of America... These and other chilling stories by noted author Joe
Hill appear in this collection.
Review
Another audiobook to pass time at work, this edition featured different narrators for each story (some of which were better than others,
or at least easier to hear in a somewhat noisy warehouse environment), plus an introduction and acknowledgements of influences and details of
writing each story. As with most collections and anthologies, I found the contents a bit of a mixed bag. While each was solidy written, some
clicked with me better than others, and a couple or three felt slightly drawn out past effectiveness. There's also a strong tendency to downer
endings, which Hill himself acknowledges. Overall, though, these stories kept me entertained (which is more than I could say for the three
audiobooks that failed to engage me before I got to this one in my Overdrive queue), and effectively evoked tension and terror, plus the
additional information was interesting.
In his fifties, death metal legend Judas Coyne is on the downside of his career; even though his music enjoys a healthy following, he
hasn't toured or even cut a single in years, and frankly lost the heart for it after two of his bandmates died. He spends his time on his
isolated New York farm with his shepherd dogs, his restored Mustang, his macabre personal collection of darkness and death-related items,
and his latest young live-in lady whom he calls Georgia, a habit from his heyday when it was too much work to remember specific names of
bedmates rather than the state he picked them up in. When he gets word of an online auction where an actual ghost is supposed to be up
for sale, Judas feels a thrill unlike anything he's experienced for years, an eagerness that makes him buy it before he can think twice.
What he gets is an old silver-buttoned black suit in a heart-shaped box... and a ghost who is not only all too real, but who is determined
to destroy his life, and the lives of everyone around him, to fulfill a very personal vendetta.
Review
Heart-Shaped Box doesn't dawdle too long on the setup, nor does it pull its punches once the terror begins and Judas realizes
what a mistake he's made... and how much damage the vengeful ghost, a former hypnotist who learned his trade torturing enemies during the
Vietnam War and whose voice has a way of worming into one's head and pulling a person's strings before they realize what's happening, can
do. Judas has lived a hard life after a hard childhood on a Louisiana pig farm, becoming jaded to others - particularly friends and his
companions - in ways that have come back to haunt him in a literal sense. The young woman "Georgia" turns out to have more to her than even
Judas realized, another victim of childhood abuse who turns out to be a fairly solid companion as they endure the ghost's campaign of
horror and death; though the ghost targets Judas specifically, the effects of the haunting expand to include everyone around him, even
strangers, who risk becoming casualties by association. The long shadow of abuse through the generations and the scars it leaves, the lives
it warps, are running themes through the story. In fighting the ghost, Judas finally faces demons in his own life and past that have
haunted him since childhood, paying a hefty price in the process. With decently-realized characters and a truly terrifying haunting, it all
makes for a fairly solid horror title.
Victoria McQueen, better known as Vic (or "the brat"), had one escape from her rough childhood and unhappy parents, on the wheels of
her bicycle through the woods and down to the old covered bridge... a bridge that has a way of taking her where she needs to be to find
things that have been lost. As she grows up, she tries to dismiss the bridge as a childhood fantasy - until she runs out of her home as
a teen and straight across the bridge to the lair of serial child killer Charlie Manx.
Manx is no ordinary killer. With his classic Rolls Royce Wraith, one of only a handful in America, he prowls the country in search of
children to "rescue" from unhappy homes. Like Vic, he can navigate roads that don't exist in normal space and time, through the
"inscapes" of imagination - but his lead somewhere far less wholesome than a covered bridge. His lead to Christmasland, a throwback
amusement park inside his own imagination, where his victims live on as monstrous wraiths stripped of their humanity. When he meets Vic,
he recognizes another "creative", one who can change reality with the force of their imaginaton and will... but Vic is a mentally
fragile girl, growing into a damaged woman, while Manx is an old pro. When she escapes and Manx is finally arrested, his reign of terror
should be over. Instead, it's just beginning - and only Vic can stop him.
Review
Having enjoyed Heart-Shaped Box, I thought I'd give another Joe Hill book a try. He presents some interesting and inherently
chilling concepts in the "inscapes" and Christmasland, though they ultimately would be cheap cardboard props without the characters who
bring them to life. Everyone in the story is damaged in some way, physically or mentally or emotionally (or multiple choice), and most
are trying - if often failing - to do best with the imperfect tools and worldview they have. Even Manx has rationalized his monstrous
predation on children, and his henchman and protege, a child-minded serial rapist named Bing, was broken long before he got in touch
with the man behind the wheel of the Wraith. Vic is particularly shattered, first by being the product of a dysfunctional marriage and
later by her own choices and struggles over the existence of the bridge. She often seemed undercut as a heroine, though, repeatedly
dismissing her own experiences as delusions only to repeatedly be devastated to discover that the covered bridge is real - as is the
danger of Charlie Manx. When Vic has a child of her own, she learns some of what her own parents went through, and even as she tries to
keep her son from feeling as lost and often rejected as she herself felt, she seems doomed to fail. The horror elements build nicely
throughout the tale, with several scary and gruesome moments (and more than one Easter egg nod to his own works and his father Stephen
King's creations), though once in a while it feels a slight bit drawn out, like it could've lost a few chapters in revision. For the
most part, though, I enjoyed it, and expect I'll be reading (or listening, rather, as this was another audiobook) to more of Hill's
works in the future.
