SMorg

I just finished (yeah, it’s 2am) a book by Joe Hill (who, by the way, is Stephen Kings son) called ‘Heart Shaped Box’. It’s about an aging rockstar who has led a life of leisure, decadence and lust. Pretty much all the good stuff in life.

But, his past is catching up to him as the ghost of the stepather of one of his many conquests makes its way into his life, turning it into a bloody, tragic and ultimately fatal shambles.

The writing is good. Hill writes likes his Dad…lots of name dropping and cultural references, as well as the same staccato -what am i doing here, this is crazy – mid-sentence interruptions SK is known for. But that’s always been a charm for me, as that’s how people think. They are in the middle of an action and second guessing it in their head while their body goes on with the plan.

The entire story has a Southern appeal to it also, which is odd since the King family was born and raised in Maine, but it’s obvious Joe has spent some time in the South, as he has a very finely attuned sense of what it is to be Southern.

In one particular scene, a character tells another that, ‘you can’t fly into the South…you have to drive. You have to see the dirt turn from brown to red and the rivers from black to a muddy haze’, and I like that, it’s true. The landscape changes and so do the people that occupy it.

Not a bad read, although toward the end I could sense he was setting it up to make it easier for some yet-to-be-named screenwriter to turn it into a mildly interesting movie that suffers only because books of this nature never translate to the screen properly. Too much of the good stuff is in the back stories and in the minds of the characters themselves.
(Although I can see Billy Bob Thornton as Jude and and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Georgia, quite easily.)

If you get a chance, take a look. if you want, you can borrow my copy.
:)