King of the Hill

When Joe Hill was a boy, his family would sit in a circle and play pass-the-book, each member taking turns at reading passages aloud. Joe’s parents were both novelists (his father sometimes engaged the youngster in storytelling exercises), and he and his older brother Owen often played a sort of compositional tag based on variations of HP Lovecraft stories.

When I suggest that his upbringing sounds like a cross between The Waltons and The Addams Family, Hill emits a hearty chuckle.
“Naw, my dad’s not a scary guy,” he says. “My dad’s the most reassuring voice I know, he’s sort of the anti-fear guy. He’s a great one for stepping back from a situation and explaining why you shouldn’t be afraid. That’s not really the persona that comes through in his fiction, but he’s got this mantra, it’s been around forever: fear stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. The other acronym for fear is Fuck Everything And Run! But it’s partially true that writing is a great way to let go of the stuff you’re afraid of. If you pour it onto the page, you don’t have it in your head all the time.”
I should mention at this point that Joe’s full name is Joe Hillstrom King, that his mother Tabitha is the author of some seven novels, and his father Stephen is the most successful horror and fantasy writer of all time.
“Writing is a weird way to seek your living,” Joe says. “It didn’t seem real when I was growing up, but one of the reasons I fell into it was I’d come home from school and my mum’s a writer, I’d find her in her office tapping away, I’d find my dad in his office tapping away, it just seemed like making shit up was a perfectly rational way to make a living. So pretty much by the time I was 12 or 13 I’d come home and figure, ‘It’s time for me to write’.”
And write. At 34, Joe has just published his first full length novel Heart-Shaped Box, a best-seller with a bullet in the US, and a book whose success has afforded him a luxury only a handful of debutante novelists enjoy: an overseas tour.
“I go to three or four book stores a day, which is like sending a heroin addict to a head shop,” he laughs. “I was in Forbidden Planet, and there were people talking to me, a guy from the publishing company and a book seller, but I can’t hear them ’cos I’m looking at all the action figures and collections of pulp short stories.”
Joe decided to come clean about his genealogy only after he’d established himself with a limited edition short story collection entitled 20th Century Ghosts, published in October 2005 by the tiny British imprint PS Publishing after it was turned down by most of the major American publishing houses (according to the author, it’ll be reprinted by Gollancz in the autumn).
By the time people began to notice Joe’s marked physical resemblance to his father – the thick beard and piercing eyes didn’t help – 20th Century Ghosts had received the British Fantasy Award, The International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award for best collection, and his novella ‘Voluntary Committal’ was a World Fantasy Award winner last year.
Like another ’06 World Fantasy Award winner, George Saunders, Joe came back to speculative stories after years of labouring at the coalface of Carver-like realism.
“That’s exactly the way things worked out for me,” he says. “I wrote a lot of mainstream literary stories that I couldn’t sell to save my life, I just collected rejection after rejection, and eventually I sort of found my footing with this short story called ‘Pop Art’, which was in my first collection. ‘Pop Art’ was about the friendship between a hoodlum and an inflatable boy called Arthur Roth who’s made of plastic and is filled with air and weighs about six ounces, and if he sat on a thumb tack it’d kill him. I had a blast writing that story, it really took off for me, and I wound up selling it. After that I started thinking, ‘Maybe there’s something in weird tales for me.’
“I had also read an essay by Bernard Malamud called ‘Why Fantasy?’, and he talked about this idea that all literature is make-believe, and fantasy is as honest and valid as realism. That the invented worlds of Norman Mailer can seem more ‘real’ than the invented worlds of Lewis Carroll, but they’re not, they’re pure make-believe, and with that in mind a writer could introduce a fallen angel or a ghost or a talking animal and that was fair game. After reading that I thought, ‘Maybe I should just let my freak flag fly’. It still took a while, I had a lot to learn, but that was a big step.”
Over the next decade Joe honed his craft, inheriting his father’s storytelling gene and an innate understanding of how to ju-jitsu the reader’s phobic pressure points.
“Even though I’ve written ghost stories and stuff, I don’t really think I write from the stuff that scares me,” he considers. “I tend to write more from the stuff that gets me excited, the stuff that I love, like in Heart-Shaped Box, stuff about loud angry music, stuff I cared passionately about for years. And I think in my short stories too, the title story of the 20th Century Ghosts collection is about a guy who meets the woman who haunts a small town movie theatre, this girl who died during the The Wizard Of Oz, before the film was over, and she’s so pissed off about it she still haunts the theatre. Really that was a chance to write about something else I loved: old movie houses, the classic films of the ‘30s and ‘40s, so it’s got scary elements, but first and foremost I was interested in exploring a subject that excited me.
“I think there are things you can do which are almost like steroids for your imagination,” he continues. “One is you can read poetry, and another is you can read comic books, and they’re sort of exactly the same straight jolt, like a double espresso. The right poetry can have mixed concepts and language that fills you up with your own ideas to explore, and there’s something about a well-written comic book that can be so out of control and such a work of pure happy invention. And comic books don’t sit still, they have a huge sense of forward motion. You almost never read a good comic book that doesn’t have the pedal to the floor. And I love that.”
That’s certainly the pace of Heart-Shaped Box, which hits the ground running and then hares towards the denouement without skimping on atmosphere or characterisation. In a nutshell, it’s the tale of a soul-dead, womanising, semi-retired goth rock star by the name of Judas Coyne who, given to collecting ghoulish memorabilia, buys a ghost online. The ghost, it transpires, wants him dead.
Now I have to admit, I’m a fussy reader, but I couldn’t put Heart-Shaped Box down until it was good and done. I’m not easily spooked either, but the character of the southern-fried undead dowser and hypnotist Craddock creeped the hell out of me.
“I love it when you can find a story that chops your head off and you can just fall into it,” Joe laughs. “I’m glad you had that experience with Heart-Shaped Box.”
Hill’s novel also manages to modernise ghost story tropes in the way it posits technology as a medium for the supernatural. The scenes that describe Jude’s first wife watching a snuff movie she found in his collection are truly chilling.
“Jude’s got that snuff film,” Joe says, “but the idea is, does he own the film or does it own him?”
And of course, there’s the idea of the internet as 21st century conduit for all manner of bad juju. One thing Japanese and Korean horrormeisters understand is that ghosts are even scarier when they manifest themselves through modern media. And revisiting Bram Stoker’s Dracula recently, this reader was struck by how brazenly it utilised what was then considered cutting edge technology: cameras, telegrams, typewriters.
“Yeah, doesn’t the doctor (Seward) record stuff on a phonograph or wax records or something?” Joe points out. “I thought Ringu was great. The reason the second film was so awful was because it has nothing about the videotape in it. The videotape was the most frightening and upsetting part of it. Our technology can be kind of creepy. It’s crept into every part of our lives. It’s funny, before the internet, David Cronenberg had a film called Videodrome.”
I remember it well. On first viewing at age 13, it felt as though my head had been cracked open and scooped out like an egg.
“Boy, that’s a really diseased film, I love it, I’ve seen it about three or four times. James Woods discovers this cult guerilla TV station broadcasting these sick torture sex and snuff films. If you were going to remake it, I assume it would be clips on YouTube. Even as far back as Videodrome in the early 80s, maybe even a little bit before it, I think there was an awareness that technology is bringing with it this great connectivity, and you’re getting all these artists coming in from the edges of the culture, which is great, but there’s also this creepy side of it that’s fun to explore.”
The other thing worth mentioning about Heart-Shaped Box is that the rock star angle doesn’t feel at all forced or corny. So many rock ‘n’ roll themed novels or films are, like Walter Hill’s Streets Of Fire, stylised beyond all credibility.
“That’s got Willem Dafoe walking around in black rubber pants and suspenders for most of the film,” Joe chuckles, “it’s a little hard not to laugh. He looks like he just walked out of Exit To Eden or some really bad fetish comedy.”
Heart-Shaped Box, by contrast, gets under Jude Coyne’s skin (he even has his own MySpace page www.myspace.com/judecoyne) and explores the self-loathing and wasteful lassitude of a rock star put out to pasture. Plus, his story links all eras of the devil’s music, from Johnny Cash and Hank Williams to Black Sabbath and Marilyn Manson.
“Well, the plot is about a guy who buys a haunted suit online,” Joe points out, “but of course, this is a theme that runs throughout blues and country music and hard rock, this idea of selling your soul for advantage. There’s been a brisk trade in souls in popular music going back to the 1920s, probably even further: you see that in Robert Johnson right up through Led Zeppelin. And also you can see that in country music.
“Just as a total aside, if heavy metal is more about attitude than sound, I would say Hank Williams III is more heavy metal than anyone in hard rock. There’s this dark underside to country music, which you don’t really hear in the top 40 – really satisfyingly emotionally creepy.”
Hill’s use of music in the book is double-edged. On one hand there’s the idea of a jaded death-rocker getting his just desserts for messing with occult paraphernalia as a fashion or lifestyle statement. On the other, the music acquires a talismanic power when he picks up a guitar and starts to write songs again. He sings to keep the ghosts away.
“I think a big part of what Heart-Shaped Box is about is the way a certain very unhappy person will use loud angry music as the hammer to beat at the cage,” Joe says, “and that’s who Jude has been ever since he left Louisiana. His music and the persona he invented for himself are a kind of armour he used to protect himself from the sharp edges of the world. I think that is a fairly true character type in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, people who have made music that spills out of their anger or outrage or unhappiness. The tragic thing is that sort of musician has a tendency not to last very long.
“There are guys kinda like Jude – Steve Tyler and Robert Plant come to mind – but those guys aren’t really angry, they’re rock ‘n’ roll survivors who seem to find a way to reinvent themselves every few years. Those guys don’t seem especially dark. If I was gonna find one word to describe them, I’d pick horny. The angry guys, the really deeply unhappy guys like Kurt Cobain and maybe Elliot Smith, tend to sort of self-immolate.”
The unwritten moral of Heart-Shaped Box is that if Jude had mainlined into his own creativity and found a way to grow old through his music instead of banging 22-year-olds and mooching around the house for five years, none of this stuff would have happened. The devil finds work for idle hands and all that.
“Yeah, when we first meet him, he’s a guy who’s literally looking to buy himself some trouble, and managed to get more than he expected. When I first started the book I thought it would be a short story called ‘Private Collection’, about 30 pages long, and that Jude would buy the ghost online and it would come to him and he would realise too late that he’d made a terrible mistake and he wouldn’t be able to save himself and would end up riding the night road with Craddock. But it didn’t work out that way, Jude refused to stick to the script.
“And part of the reason it didn’t work out was I didn’t want to let Jude go that easily, I got interested in who he was, why he’s morally adrift and is mean to the people who love him. He has this name, Judas Coyne, as soon as I came up with that I started thinking, ‘What a bullshit name’ – but I could see it as his stage name, and I became interested in who he was when he wasn’t Judas Coyne. And I felt the same way about his attitude, the bluster and anger and isolation, that it was a kind of disguise, the wall he threw up to protect himself. So I got curious about who he was, and that became a novel.”
Ultimately, a Trojan horse of a novel. Yes, Heart-Shaped Box is built around a schticky supernatural hook, but like any great horror or fantasy novel (Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes spring to mind) it functions as allegory for a lot of weighty ideas. In this case, physical pain, mortality, age, family, doubles and karmic payback. The book’s dual examination of demonic possession and the uncanny potency of music places it one door down the literary block from Pat McCabe’s Winterwood. (A week after we spoke, Warner Bros announced that McCabe’s frequent co-conspirator Neil Jordan will direct the film adaptation of Heart-Shaped Box.) It’s also another example of the merging of genre and mainstream fiction.
“I think that the tide has shifted a little bit in the last three or four years,” Joe says. “There’s been a sort of embrace of genre fiction in the literary world. There have been writers like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, literary writers who are welcoming genre fiction back into the fold. And at the same time there have been some genre writers like Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman who have crossed the line and they’ve taken genre fiction to a wider audience and managed to pull in people who would normally turn their noses up at ghost stories.”
I read Gaiman’s Fragile Things over the winter and, like Hill’s novel and Brett Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, it gave me the same feeling I had as a teenager, reading for pure pleasure.
“Boy, that’s an amazing collection of short stories,” Hill says. “The thing that blew me away about Fragile Things is it’s one of the only collections I’ve read like a page turner. There was a story in there called ‘Bitter Grounds’ that I think I’ve thought about every day since I read it. It begins with this guy saying, ‘I was dead’, some key relationship in his life has been swept away from him, and he winds up driving to New Orleans to become a zombie. That was really, really unsettling and strange. I would love to have Neil Gaiman’s grace and light touch and his sense of humour. He’s sort of a magician.”
Another magician is Alan Moore. Heart-Shaped Box is prefaced with a quote from Moore’s novel Voice Of The Fire. It’s fair to say that both he and Gaiman have shaped a climate that makes it much easier for writers like Hill to re-infiltrate the mainstream.
“Absolutely. I think that Alan Moore is one of the four or five great writers of his generation. That might sound like exaggeration, but I really think he is one of the great literary voices. I’ve read him my whole life, I think I probably read my first Alan Moore comic when I was 13 or 14, and so his voice has been there in my imagination for decades now. Voice Of The Fire is a brilliant piece of work, really terribly overlooked.
“Probably the keystone work of Don DeLillo’s career was Underworld, and in a lot of ways Voice Of The Fire is the same kind of book, only it’s better. It does the same thing, it tells the secret history of a place across a long stretch of history, but it tells real honest to god stories, whereas Underworld kinda tells pieces of stories, which is sort of a literary cheat. I mean, I’m not ten per cent of the writer Don DeLillo is, and I loved Underworld, but you know what I’m saying: one way to attain literary credibility is to only tell part of a story and not really lower yourself to tell a full tale.
“I think a lot of people feel like the peak of Alan Moore’s career was Watchmen, but I think he’s done even better work since; League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen has been remarkable. Someone asked me if I had done a lot of research on the south, ’cos that’s where the book heads, and I said, ‘No, not really, but I did read all of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comics!’ That’s why Jude’s hometown is Moore’s Corner, because it’s Alan Moore’s south. So my version has nothing to do with the real south. I don’t think Alan Moore’s been to Louisiana either, I just think he did his best from Northampton!”
Heart-Shaped Box is published by Gollancz.