Heart-Shaped Box
A Novel
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- € 10,99
Beschrijving uitgever
“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.
Aging death-metal rock legend Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre: a cookbook for cannibals...a used hangman's noose...a snuff film. But nothing he possesses is as unique or as dreadful as his latest purchase in this chilling gothic horror novel: a one-of-a-kind curiosity bought off the Internet that arrives at his door in a black heart-shaped box...a musty dead man's suit still inhabited by the spirit of its late owner. And now everywhere Judas Coyne goes, the old man is there—watching, waiting, dangling a razor blade on a chain from his bony hand.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stoker-winner Hill features a particularly merciless ghost in his\t\t powerful first novel. Middle-aged rock star Judas Coyne collects morbid curios\t\t for fun, so doesn't think twice about buying a suit advertised at an online\t\t auction site as haunted by its dead owner's ghost. Only after it arrives does\t\t Judas discover that the suit belonged to Craddock McDermott, the stepfather of\t\t one of Coyne's discarded groupies, and that the old man's ghost is a malignant\t\t spirit determined to kill Judas in revenge for his stepdaughter's suicide.\t\t Judas isn't quite the cad or Craddock the avenging angel this scenario makes\t\t them at first, but their true motivations reveal themselves only gradually in a\t\t fast-paced plot that crackles with expertly planted surprises and revelations.\t\t Hill (20th Century Ghosts) gives his\t\t characters believably complex emotional lives that help to anchor the\t\t supernatural in psychological reality and prove that (as one character\t\t observes) "horror was rooted in sympathy." His subtle and skillful treatment of\t\t horrors that could easily have exploded over the top and out of control helps\t\t make this a truly memorable debut.
