Heart-Shaped Box

Heart-Shaped Box was published in February 2007 and was the debut novel of Joe Hill, who had already published short fiction. The novel is a ghost story with a rock-and-roll frame: the protagonist is an ageing star who has spent his career being deliberately unpleasant, and the haunting is connected to a fan and to a period of his life he would prefer not to think about. The sections of the book are named after songs by Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Nine Inch Nails and Pearl Jam, and the title itself comes from the Nirvana song.

The haunting is written as a physical problem rather than a psychological one. The old man in the suit can appear anywhere, is not bound by the geography of the house, and carries a weapon that does real damage, which means the middle of the novel is a road trip with a ghost in pursuit. Hill sets that against the material his protagonist would rather avoid: the way he treated the women in his life, the death of his father, and a family in Florida that has been carrying its own grief for decades.

Hill's second novel, Horns, followed in 2010, and his short-story collection 20th Century Ghosts had already appeared before this one. Heart-Shaped Box is a standalone, and it is the book that established him as a horror novelist in his own right rather than as the son of one.

The ghost's grievance is specific and human, which is what stops the novel from being a monster story in a rock-star wrapper, and the last act is a negotiation rather than an exorcism.