Heart-Shaped Box LP

“Wild, mesmerizing, perversely witty….A Valentine from hell.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times The publication of Joe Hill’s beautifully textured, deliciously scary debut novel Heart-Shaped Box was greeted with the sort of overwhelming critical acclaim that is rare for a work of skin-crawling supernatural terror. It was cited as a Best Book of the Year by Atlanta magazine, the Tampa Tribune, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and the Village Voice, to name but a few. Award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling Neil Gaiman of The Sandman, The Graveyard Book, and Anansi Boys fame calls Joe Hill’s story of a jaded rock star haunted by a ghost he purchased on the internet, “relentless, gripping, powerful.” Open this Heart-Shaped Box from two-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Hill if you dare and see what all the well-deserved hoopla is about.

People

“A thriller with moments of terror and genuine humor.”

New York Times

“A wild, mesmerizing, perversely witty tale of horror . . . . a Valentine from hell.”

relentless, gripping, powerful, a genuine page-turner

“Heart-Shaped Box is, quite simply, the best debut horror novel since Clive Barker’s Damnation Game...It’s the kind of book that the overworked adjectives people use on book jackets

James Rollins

“Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box starts with a premise that is as simple as it is brilliant: a ghost for sale on the Internet. But here is a tale that is far from a one-trick pony. It chills with every word, surprises with every page, and twists with every chapter. Here is a debut as literate as it is horrifying . . . and the resounding introduction of a new master in the field of suspense.”

Austin Chronicle

“Heart-Shaped Box. . . rocks. It’s a flat-out, white-line, turbo-charged, relentless, bleakly humorous, and, above all, honest story . . . Hill’s fealty to the autumnal suspirations of the darkest sorts of dread is instantly apparent. And this, as they say, is just the beginning.”

Entertainment Weekly

“The shocks in Hill’s riveting debut novel can be lurid and blood-drenched, or as quietly chilling as a casual phone call from an old, dead friend.”

New York Times bestselling author Kathy Reichs[Hill]’s got horror down pat, and his debut is hair-raising fun.”

“Dark, taut, and deliciously terrifying. Heart-Shaped Box is a roaring good read.”

Bookseller (London)

“A relentlessly scary ghost story.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Hill is flawless in his ability to articulate frailties that humanize his characters and make the vulnerable to intrusions of the strange . . . . One of the most confident and assured new voices in horror and dark fantasy to emerge in recent years.”

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Powerful . . . a fast-paced plot that crackles with expertly planted surprises and revelations . . . a truly memorable debut.”

The Observer

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

Cleveland Plain Dealer

“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.”

From the Back Cover

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 purchase, an item he discovered on the Internet:I will sell my stepfather's ghost to the highest bidder . . .For a thousand dollars, Jude has become the owner of a dead man's suit, said to be haunted by a restless spirit. But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no metaphorical ghost, no benign conversation piece. Suddenly the suit's previous owner is everywhere: behind the bedroom door . . . seated in Jude's restored Mustang . . . staring out from his widescreen TV. Waiting—with a gleaming razor blade on a chain dangling from one hand . . .

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Heart-Shaped Box LPBy Joe HillHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.Copyright © 2007 Joe HillAll right reserved.ISBN: 9780061233241Chapter OneJude had a private collection.He had framed sketches of the Seven Dwarfs on the wall of his studio, in between his platinum records. John Wayne Gacy had drawn them while he was in jail and sent them to him. Gacy liked golden-age Disney almost as much as he liked molesting little kids; almost as much as he liked Jude's albums.Jude had the skull of a peasant who had been trepanned in the sixteenth century, to let the demons out. He kept a collection of pens jammed into the hole in the center of the cranium.He had a three-hundred-year-old confession, signed by a witch. "I did spake with a black dogge who sayd hee wouldst poison cows, drive horses mad and sicken children for me if I wouldst let him have my soule, and I sayd aye, and after did give him sucke at my breast." She was burned to death.He had a stiff and worn noose that had been used to hang a man in England at the turn of the nineteenth century, Aleister Crowley's childhood chessboard, and a snuff film. Of all the items in Jude's collection, this last was the thing he felt most uncomfortable about possessing. It had come to him by way of a police officer, a man who had worked security at some shows in L.A. The cop had said the video was diseased. He said it with some enthusiasm. Jude had watched it and felt that he was right. It was diseased. It had also, in an indirect way, helped hasten the end of Jude's marriage. Still he held on to it.Many of the objects in his private collection of the grotesque and the bizarre were gifts sent to him by his fans. It was rare for him to actually buy something for the collection himself. But when Danny Wooten, his personal assistant, told him there was a ghost for sale on the Internet and asked did he want to buy it, Jude didn't even need to think. It was like going out to eat, hearing the special, and deciding you wanted it without even looking at the menu. Some impulses required no consideration.Danny's office occupied a relatively new addition, extending from the northeastern end of Jude's rambling, 110-year-old farmhouse. With its climate control, OfficeMax furniture, and coffee-and-cream industrial carpet, the office was coolly impersonal, nothing at all like the rest of the house. It might have been a dentist's waiting room, if not for the concert posters in stainless-steel frames. One of them showed a jar crammed with staring eyeballs, bloody knots of nerves dangling from the backs of them. That was for the All Eyes On You tour.No sooner had the addition been built than Jude had come to regret it. He had not wanted to drive forty minutes from Piecliff to a rented office in Poughkeepsie to see to his business, but that would've probably been preferable to having Danny Wooten right here at the house. Here Danny and Danny's work were too close. When Jude was in the kitchen, he could hear the phones ringing in there, both of the office lines going off at once sometimes, and the sound was maddening to him. He had not recorded an album in years, had hardly worked since Jerome and Dizzy had died (and the band with them), but still the phones rang and rang. He felt crowded by the steady parade of petitioners for his time, and by the never-ending accumulation of legal and professional demands, agreements and contracts, promotions and appearances, the work of Judas Coyne Incorporated, which was never done, always ongoing. When he was home, he wanted to be himself, not a trademark.For the most part, Danny stayed out of the rest of the house. Whatever his flaws, he was protective of Jude's private space. But Danny considered him fair game if Jude strayed into the office—something Jude did, without much pleasure, four or five times a day. Passing through the office was the fastest way to the barn and the dogs. He could've avoided Danny by going out through the front door and walking all the way around the house, but he refused to sneak around his own home just to avoid Danny Wooten.Besides, it didn't seem possible Danny could always have something to bother him with. But he always did. And if he didn't have anything that demanded immediate attention, he wanted to talk. Danny was from Southern California originally, and there was no end to his talk. He would boast to total strangers about the benefits of wheatgrass, which included making your bowel movements as fragrant as a freshly mowed lawn. He was thirty years old but could talk skateboarding and PlayStation with the pizza-delivery kid like he was fourteen. Danny would get confessional with air-conditioner repairmen, tell them how his sister had OD'd on heroin in her teens and how as a young man he had been the one to find his mother's body after she killed herself. He was impossible to embarrass. He didn't know the meaning of shy.Jude was coming back inside from feeding Angus and Bon and was halfway across Danny's field of fire—just beginning to think he might make it through the office unscathed—when Danny said, "Hey, Chief, check this out." Danny opened almost every demand for attention with just this line, a statement Jude had learned to dread and resent, a prelude to half an hour of wasted time, forms to fill out, faxes to look at. Then Danny told him someone was selling a ghost, and Jude forgot all about begrudging him. He walked around the desk so he could look over Danny's shoulder at his computer screen.Danny had discovered the ghost at an online auction site, not eBay but one of the wannabes. Jude moved his gaze over the item description while Danny read aloud. Danny would've cut his food for him if Jude gave him the chance. He had a streak of subservience that Jude found, frankly, revolting in a man.Continues...Excerpted from Heart-Shaped Box LPby Joe Hill Copyright © 2007 by Joe Hill. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

About the Author

Joe Hill is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Fireman, NOS4A2, Horns, and Heart-Shaped Box; Strange Weather, a collection of novellas; and the acclaimed story collections Full Throttle and 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of a seven-volume comic book series, Locke & Key. Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV, including NOS4A2 (AMC), Locke & Key (Netflix), In the Tall Grass (Netflix), and The Black Phone (Blumhouse).

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