Heart-Shaped Box

By Joe Hill
(Harper, Mass Market Paperback, 9780061147944, 384pp.)

Publication Date: April 2008

Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Hardcover, Paperback, Paperback

Categories: Ghost, Thrillers

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Description

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

I will "sell" my stepfather's ghost to the highest bidder. . . .

For a thousand dollars, Jude will become the proud owner of a dead man's suit, said to be haunted by a restless spirit. He isn't afraid. He has spent a lifetime coping with ghosts—of an abusive father, of the lovers he callously abandoned, of the bandmates he betrayed. What's one more?

But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no imaginary or metaphorical ghost, no benign conversation piece. It's the real thing.

And suddenly the suit's previous owner is everywhere: behind the bedroom door . . . seated in Jude's restored vintage Mustang . . . standing outside his window . . . staring out from his widescreen TV. Waiting—with a gleaming razor blade on a chain dangling from one bony hand. . . .

A 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.




Praise For Heart-Shaped Box

“A fast-paced journey on wheels borrowed from hell’s used-car lot, and there aren’t a lot of comfort breaks...The pictures [Hill] painted colored my dreams and darkened my mood even after I’d put the book down.”
-Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A relentlessly scary ghost story.”
-Bookseller (London)

“Powerful . . . a fast-paced plot that crackles with expertly planted surprises and revelations . . . a truly memorable debut.”
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

[Hill]’s got horror down pat, and his debut is hair-raising fun.”
-Kirkus Reviews

“You can’t go wrong with Heart-Shaped Box.” Top Five Fiction-Books of 2007
-The Observer

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