Heart-Shaped Box, reviewed by raidergirl3

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Great suspenseful thriller and winner of the Bram Stoker Award 2007 for a first novel.

Jude Coyne, an aging heavy rocker collects young girlfriends and occult-ish items, so when he sees a ghost for sale on an E-Bay type site, he snaps it up. Bad decision. The book follows the ramifications of their interactions. It's hard to describe a good horror novel, because what makes it so good is the way the author takes you into an unbelievable world so perfectly and gradually that all of a sudden it has happened and you can't put it down and you can't look away and you don't want to know but you have to know. Hill has done this. It's like a great Stephen King novel. The kind where you wish it had been 2oo pages shorter but it was still very good. This is the one that is 200 pages shorter but still as good. Hill takes such a risk of comparison by writing a novel like his father would, but he pulls it off.

I'd recommend this as a book for the RIP III that might happen in the fall. Ghosts and festering wounds and vengeance all lead to a rip-roaring great spooky read.

raidergirl's list

Last year I joined this challenge half way through and I've read 7 so far, and would have liked to read a few more. I'll probably be able to get through 8 this year - I don't want to go with one each month, but I know I'll read more than 6.
When I peruse the lists, these six stand out as books I noticed this year and hoped to read. I'll leave room for my 'bandwagon reads' at the bottom.

1. The Gathering by Ann Enright (NYT 2007)
2. Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill (PW Best Book)
3. Then We Came to The End by Joshua Ferris (NYT 2007)
4. The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak (2007 IRA CL/R SIG Notable Books)
5. House of Meeting by Martin Amis (NYT 2007)
6. Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah (NYT 2007)
7. In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar (NYT 2007)
8. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (ALA 2007)
9. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (NYT 2007)
10. The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro (NYT 2007, PW Best Book)