In today's fickle and over-stimulated world, it is hard sometimes to remember that literature was the preferred emotion evoking pastime for hundreds of years and that the Blu-ray movies we watch and video games we play all have to begin with a story, whether an original one like the one I am about to discuss or something inspired by a classical work. It is for these reasons I rarely review just a novel, so you know that this must be a book of the highest entertainment value. At least that's how it was pitched to me.
Joe Hill, a relative newcomer to the suspense scene (you may know his dad, a guy by the name of Stephen King), is about to release his second novel called Horns on February 16, 2010, and was kind enough to send me an advanced copy to see if it could hold my video-game-addicted attention span.
Horns revolves around a young man from New Hampshire named Ignatius Perrish. Our sad and sorry protagonist has had a horrible streak of luck over the past year or so as he's seen himself all but exiled from his community as he was accused of the murder of his lovely girlfriend, Merrin. Although cleared on all counts of the heinous act, Ignatius (Ig for short) has seen his life spiral out of control as the depression that consumes him over the loss of his one true love has left him a shell of his former self. That is until he wakes up one morning after drinking all night to find that he has two, small, black protuberances coming from his temples. After some haunting trial and error, Ig finds that he now has the ability to make people tell him their deepest, darkest secrets, have their entire lives of sin revealed to him with the slightest touch, and can bend their wills to his sinful suggestions.
Once Ig embraces his newfound abilities, he pledges to find out what really happened to Merrin on the night she was murdered and so begins a conquest for revenge that will put Ig through an emotional roller coaster the likes of which would break most men. Then again, you can't really call Ig just a man now can you? When it comes to revenge, the devil is in the details...
I have to admit, like Ig is possessed by some awesome power in Horns, I was possessed to not put this book down. The book is about 360 pages, broken down into 50 short chapters, and by the time I was through the first five or six chapters, I couldn't stop reading. I needed to find out more about what Ig would do with his powers and how they would evolve. The way Joe Hill describes the experiences Ig has when he reads people's histories through touch is incredible, as if he was painting a vivid picture that cuts right to the core of human nature.
Also, the description of his main characters made me feel as if these were people from my own community, people who I could've grown up with. I felt like a silent witness within the tight-knit circle of characters with which all the action takes place in. I felt my heart strings tugged on with Ig's unwavering devotion towards Merrin, even in her death, and felt an unquenchable rage boiling within my own gut at the betrayal and conspiracy against Ig that he must overcome.
There were a couple of drawbacks to this experience though. Joe Hill took 40% of the book just giving the back story on the characters to develop that connection between me, the reader, and his characters, mixing up action in present time with drawn out flashbacks over every 10 chapters. I felt that Hill could have condensed many of these flashback chapters and still gotten his point across and it would have given me a more pleasurable read.
These fodder chapters reminded me a little bit of his dad's writing in how Hill became a little too detail oriented. Instead of letting the natural narratives of the story continue, the obsession on the details would shock you back out of the world Hill was trying to create and hurt the overall experience by creating lulls in the otherwise frantic action.
Of course, this could just be a suspense building tactic since Hill's first 10 chapters are so brilliant that he more than likely will have you hooked for the rest of the ride (like myself) when you hit the first flashback in Chapter 11. Along with this, the ending seemed a little too anti-climatic. I won't go into it any further because I refuse to give away any of the devilish details, but considering how much back story I was given, when I was finished with Horns, I felt like I needed something more.
However, I was happy to have read Horns and look forward to Hill's next work. There were some very memorable passages in this original story that drew emotion from me and they easily overshadowed the lulls that popped up during the flashbacks. I would recommend Horns to anyone looking to read a very detail driven suspense story or maybe to kill some time on a cross-country trip. Horns hits bookstores February 16, 2010.
Horns by Joe Hill gets a 3.5 out of 5.
-Ray Carsillo
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