"...it's tempting to speculate whether Joe Hill, who is not-so-secretly King's son, Joseph Hillstrom King, is actually another avatar of the man himself."

Ever notice how prolific Stephen King's been lately? After dawdling over the Dark Tower series for most of my adult life, he sneezed out the rest of the series earlier this decade, wrote about a dozen new novels in the time it took me to hunt down and read Hearts In Atlantis, and even good old Richard Bachman seems to have crawled out of the grave to pen a new one. Given all this prolificity, it's tempting to speculate whether Joe Hill, who is not-so-secretly King's son, Joseph Hillstrom King, is actually another avatar of the man himself.

Certainly, Hill's debut novel, Heart Shaped Box, has many of the cadences of his father's fiction. It's a big, sprawling horror odyssey that takes us from a lavish farmhouse in New York State to the depths of the American south. The supernatural horror is mixed in with the horrors of modern American life - memories of Vietnamese atrocities, tales of child abuse and a stream of references to rock songs. Of course, Hill's references are more to songs of the 90s than the 60s fare his father usually favours. Also, he makes them seem more topical by making his protagonist, Judas Coyne, an aging rockstar in the Lemmy mould, a hell-raising riff monger who burst on the scene in the wake of the 70s and is now semi-retired and lives in seclusion (apart from a Goth girlfriend, two German Shephard dogs and a personal secretary) in the aforementioned farmhouse. Judas Coyne has dabbled in the requisite heavy metal occultism, and has a hearty interest in the more morbid aspects of life, hence his collection of peculiar and eerie odds and ends - the signed confession of a 17th century witch, a rope that was used to hang a murderer, even a snuff film given to him by a cop. Hence also his succession of Goth girlfriends, whom he names after their states of origin. The latest one is called Georgia. His secretary notices a ghost up for sale on an online auction site (not eBay, incidentally) and suggests that Coyne might want it for his collection. What's being auctioned is actually a dead man's suit. Apparently the dead man will haunt any place where the suit is, so that buying the suit equals buying the ghost. Coyne buys the suit, and in some of the most original and genuinely eerie scenes in the book, starts seeing the old man's ghost around his house.

It turns out that the old man is the stepfather of a former girlfriend, Florida, who went back home and supposedly commited suicide after being dumped by Coyne. Now, stepdaddy is out for revenge. Rather crudely, he stalks and taunts Coyne and promises to make him kill his current flame and then himself in a ridiculously badass way that winds up reminding me more of cheesily ultraviolent thrillers than the eerie menace of vintage horror. But of course, this isn't the nightmare wine of elitist eldritch horror - this is a frothy, rollicking, populist American extreme-horror brew from the King-dom. As the story unfolds, Coyne confronts not just the vengeful ghost of Florida's stepfather, but ghosts from his own past, a process that Hill does occasionally manage to make less trite than it seems. There's an interesting conceit about the ghost hating Coyne's music, and Coyne being able to ward off evil when he is tapped into his creative source, literally singing for his life, but it isn't really developed much further than that, so there's no rocking face-off between a Les Paul-wielding Coyne, trading licks with a chickenpickin' banjo-strumming ghost. Frankly, that would have been a bit of an improvement over the actual denouement, where the ghost inhabits Coyne's just-deceased father's body and is finally stopped by Coyne's knife-wielding girlfriend, and the ghosts of the dead girl and his two German Shephards, who have died after their usefulness as plot points (animal familiars, effective against vengeful ghosts) wore out. There's a lot of blood, a lot of screaming and frantic running about and afterwards a remarkably saccharine happy ending for Coyne and his girlfriend. There's even a wedding scene.

Joe Hill hasn't exactly written the most original horror debut in years. What he has done is put together an effective page-turning slab of mainstream American horror. It is viscerally horrific and scary more often than metaphysically disturbing, which may or may not work for you depending on the sort of horror you favour. It's also a bit heavy-handed with its character development, somehow transforming Coyne and his girlfriend from a somewhat-creepy rocker and his almost-jailbait Goth stripper keep to a pair of sensitive, loving and integrated human beings through the process of flinging bad supernatural shit at them. For all that, the novel flows very well, with very few let-ups in the pace and Hill displays a ear for naturalistic dialogue that may be one of the better things he's inherited from his father. It drew me in for the duration, and is the sort of book you can devour in one long, frantic sitting. It might be best to read it as such, as horror candy for the part of you that wants to be scared, but without too much obscurity and not for too long. If you're looking for a more systematic derangement of everyday reality by dark, numinous forces, you'll have to look elsewhere.