The Phantom of the Sawdust Ring
SEE PAGE 16
“Dey Ain’t No Ghosts”
A Hallowe’en Story by ELLIS PARKER BUTLER
The Varsity Murder
A Bargain with a Spirit
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I know someone who looks just like this woman.
The
GHOST of a
BURNING
SHIP
PARK AVENUE VAMPIRE
LON CHANEY’S Favorite Ghost Story
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My WeekEnd with the Other World
The Phantom of the Big Top
The House of the Dancing Mirror
A friend of mine gave me this book. Why do you always have to give me that look when I say that I have friends? And no, it’s not a member of the Sesame Street cast. I should never have talked about how Grover is a pal of mine. That will teach me to brag. Grover did not give me this book. It was another friend.
Heart-Shaped Box is one of those books that would otherwise lurk in obscurity (albeit good book obscurity) except that it did one extra thing that made it special and put it on the New York Times Bestseller List: It captured the zeitgeist. Heart-Shaped Box is really about the Boomer generation. Think about it. All the Boomers see themselves as aging rockers who lost their souls (and/or innocence) somewhere along the line. All the Boomers are having to face mortality. Not just their own, but the mortality of their parents. Boomers feel like they are the generation that should be forever young. All of this and more is reflected in the protagonist, Judas Coyne. He’s a sour old rocker who reminds me of maybe Marilyn Manson but only if Marilyn Manson was as old as Ozzy Osbourne.
Don’t look at me like that. Ozzy was born in 1948.
If you’re still not convinced that this book is about the Boomer generation, I have two words for you: Vietnam War. Yes, the Vietnam War figures into this book, which to me is the nail in the coffin. Anyhow… Like 8 million American Boomers, Judas Coyne, or “Jude” as he is known in the book, is getting old. Let’s face it, Jude has lost a lot of his sparkle and zest for life. He is divorced, and lives with the latest in a string of young goth chicks who he names after the states he finds them in. Our goth chick of the moment is named Georgia. Jude’s father is dying, and Jude refuses to visit the old man because he physically abused both Jude and his mother when Jude was a child. Little does he know it, but mortality is coming for Jude in the form of the ghost of the stepfather of his last goth chick, Florida.
Jude’s assistant alerts him to someone selling a haunted suit on an Internet auction site. Jude tends to collect strange items like this so he tells his assistant to press the “Buy it Now” button and win the suit. This sets in motion a string of events which are reminiscent of Stephen King’s novel Thinner if it had been a ghost story. When the suit arrives (in a heart-shaped box), it turns out that it was an elaborate trap. Jude and Georgia find themselves haunted by the vengeful ghost of Florida’s stepfather. We find out that Florida has died, and the ghost of her stepfather has come to kill Jude.
Even though I’m not a Boomer, I enjoyed this book. It isn’t exactly perfect. There are some annoying things. For instance, there is a ghostly monster truck involved. Also, there is a creepy affectation that ghosts have – they have black scribbles over their eyes – which gets explained in the end in a groan-inducing, needless passage. The good news is that these blemishes are easily overlooked. The last hundred or so pages, I was unable to put the book down.
Creepy Factor: 3 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 5 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 3 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 3 out of 5
Final result: I really enjoyed this book. I’m also happy to report that there was plenty of really strange and not so strange eroticism in the book. As I alluded in my comparison to Thinner, I think it’s fair to compare Heart-Shaped Box to the better writing of Stephen King. It has the same emotional and psychological depth and characterizations. I’m looking forward to more from Joe Hill.
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill – Harper – 2007
Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews. See you next time!
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted in a little bit, it’s due to some minor health problems I’ve been having. My doctor has me on a special diet now because she tells me I am too “fresh and airy.” She is telling me that I need to eat more blind cave fish livers and stingers from giant poisonous centipedes. My doctor is very concerned because my blood toxin levels have been dangerously low. She’s got me taking cobra bite supplements and making a fine tea out of strange fungi from archeological digs in China. This diet is giving me nightmares. This morning I had a nightmare that I was sitting next to a cute puppy. I had a hot dog like you might get at a baseball game. It had ketchup, mustard, and sweet relish on it. The hot dog was fat and pink in a white bread bun. I was breaking little pieces of my hot dog and feeding it to the puppy. Over and over. The puppy would take bites, lick my fingers and snuffle.
I woke up screaming. Stupid diet: It takes all my time. While I’m complaining, can I just say that my doctor needs a scarier mask? She does (sorry Dr. B. – I’m just saying). Anyway, you’re not here to listen to me complain about my diet and how it’s giving me nightmares, so I’ll get to the book review.
Nightmare is a ghost story. It’s also sort of a series of ghost stories that all wrap up into one story. Maia Peters is the daughter of a pair of famous ghost hunters. Maia is struggling to pay for college, when heiress Jordin Cole shows up with a proposition: show me how to investigate hauntings and I will solve your financial problems. Maia is not impressed with Jordin, but ends up agreeing. Later, Jordin goes missing and Maia joins forces with Jordin’s fiancee to investigate her disappearance. The book begins with Maia seeing a ghostly apparition of the already-missing Jordin. Then the chapters are split between flashbacks of the adventures of Maia and Jordin as they hunt ghosts, and present time with Maia and Jordin’s fiancee as they try to track down Jordin’s abductors. Does my description make sense? I hope so.
The book struck me as being very much like what Dean R. Koontz might turn in if he wrote a young adult novel. Besides being a ghost story, Nightmare is also a (low-key) suspense novel. As might be expected, the chapters about Maia and Jordin’s ghost hunting adventures are spooky, and have a growing friendship between the two as a subplot. I felt like these chapters, where the heroes of the story visit some famous haunted spots, were entertaining. The search for Jordin chapters, unfortunately, were a little bit of a letdown. Maia’s first intuitions about what has happened to Jordin lead straight to her. Instead of following the protagonist as they get lost in a labyrinth of a mystery, we watch as Maia picks up the first obvious trail and follows it directly to the villain’s lair. The entire book has a certain air of inevitability.
Something that struck me as being strange when I read this book is that there is a great deal of exposition between the characters about Christianity and how the beliefs of some Christians might (or might not) intersect with such topics as demons, ghosts, and alchemy. This puzzled me until I read some of the language on the marketing materials the publisher sent with the book and found that Bethany House is a Christian publisher, Parrish is a Christian author, and the book is categorized as “Fiction/ Christian/ Suspense.”
Creepy Factor: 3 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 1 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 0 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 2 out of 5 (For at the end where someone is getting stomped on. It was funny to me.)
Final result: I thought that the book was imaginative. At the same time, I felt that there was a lack of grit and any real sense of fear or danger. At the times where there should have been fear or danger, it seemed like the main characters got philosophical instead. Everything was explained in the end and got tied up very neatly. Besides Maia being used bodily to paint the walls of her dorm room, there was little violence. The book reminded me of reading Nancy Drew stories. Except with an enormous deus ex machina at the end. Yes, I think this book would have benefited from some grit.
Nightmare by Robin Parrish – Bethany House – 2010
Buy Nightmare at Amazon
Thanks for reading another one of my book reviews, and thanks to Bethany House for the review copy. See you next time!
Fhtagn Spoken Here.
© 2008-2011 Dark in the Dark * Book reviews, dark stuff * All Rights Reserved
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