Horns by Joe Hill
I picked up Joe Hill's second novel, Horns , with the clear understanding that it would be my make-or-break experience with this author. Hill wowed me with his debut collection, 20th Century Ghosts , a work that sits alongside Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others and Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners on the shelf of essential genre collections of the last decade, whose stories were both of and about the horror genre, constantly asking what it means to write or consume a genre rooted in misery and fear. If 20th Century Ghosts skewed towards the literary end of the genre, Hill's first novel, Heart-Shaped Box , leaned towards the pulpy end, touching only lightly and with less nuance on the questions that were at the heart of his short stories. It was a good book , but not a very interesting one, and with Horns I hoped to discover whether the writer Joe Hill wanted to be was one I would want to follow. My results are mixed. Horns is a better book--t...