KEY POINTS:
Joe Hill may be the son of bestselling horror scribe Stephen King, but he cannot be accused of using family connections to publish his debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box. The New England-based author - full name Joseph Hillstrom King - laboured in obscurity for years,
publishing a short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, under his nom de plume and selling Heart-Shaped Box before even his agent knew his identity.
"I was able to keep it a secret for a long time partly because nothing helps a writer keep a low profile more than failure,'' laughs Hill, when I meet him at his Covent Garden hotel. "I didn't have to do a lot of public appearances to support my fiction until I sold 20th Century Ghosts as part of your job is to go out and promote the book, to do public appearances. Almost as soon as I started signing books and making appearances, there was this muttering on the web - on messageboards and blogs – 'Doesn't he look like Stephen King?' There was a piecing-together of information.''
After unsuccessful stabs at literary fiction, Hill resolved to follow his father into horror and supernatural fiction. But Heart-Shaped Box - set to be made into a film by Crying Game director Neil Jordan - is as good if not better than King senior's last effort, Lisey's Story. There are also some spooky similarities between the two books, which both feature Shining-style sieges in remote locations.
"I haven't read Lisey's Story,'' says Hill, who wrote Heart-Shaped Box while his father was working on his previous novel, Cell. "I think Lisey's Story existed in draft then. My wife has since read it and she told me that there was some overlap between the two novels and I said 'is there?'''
Heart-Shaped Box, is essentially a ghost story, which harks back to the work of Victorian author Henry James, such as The Turn of the Screw. Hill's tale of aging rocker Judas Coyne, who is haunted by the malevolent ghost of a late lover's hypnotist stepfather also brings to mind the stage adaptation of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, which tours New Zealand next month.
"In many ways, Heart-Shaped Box is a very old-fashioned kind of story,'' says Hill. "Someone buying something that they shouldn't have bought and winding up with an item that they don't know how to get rid of, in this case a ghost. There's a [Henry] James story called Casting the Runes - which I haven't read -but it was made into a movie in the 50s called Curse of the Demon. Heart-Shaped Box and Curse of the Demon are wildly different in their specifics, but their underlying structures are very similar.''
Hill elevates the traditional ghost story into the interactive age as Coyne makes his fatal purchase not in a second-hand store but on an internet auction site.
"It seems natural for stories, whether they're fantasy, mystery or horror stories to reflect the life that we live now,'' says Hill. "Our technology envelops us completely so it makes sense to move the ghost story online. That was the underlying impulse. It used to be that you could write a story about a person who was isolated and in desperate trouble.
"There's no help so they've got to solve their own problems but thriller writers can't do that anymore because everyone's got a cellphone. It doesn't matter how isolated you are, you can just flip open your phone and dial 111.''
The internet has proved to be a boon for Hill as its instant nature meant that as soon as the truth of his familial roots was exposed, it spread like wildfire.
"When I first started writing, I didn't email my short stories to people, I sent them by way of snail mail,'' he says. "I put them in an envelope with a stamped, return-envelope. My agent didn't know about my dad for eight years. He just knew me as Joe Hill. It wasn't hard, we never met in person. I sent him letters and that's how it was for a long time. All this stuff with email and the cellphone, the interactivity of everything with Google, Wikipedia and MySpace, this has all grown up around us; this intellectual vegetation. It's everywhere now but four years ago, I didn't email anyone.''
Modern technology has also positively influenced Hill as the title of the novel - which refers to the container that the ghost arrives in - is derived from the Nirvana song of the same name, which was serendipitously selected by his digital music player just when he was in need of inspiration.
"I used to be more of a fan of that kind of music,'' says Hill. "I was the 'metal' guy all through high school, the first album I bought was Led Zeppelin 3. Originally, it was going to be a short story called Private Collection.
"My burnt-out rock and roll star Judas Coyne buys this haunted suit online and UPS drops it off at his house. As I was writing that, I was listening to iTunes on random and Nirvana's Heart-Shaped Box came up. I thought 'that's funny, I'll stick it in a heart-shaped box,' which became the title of the story and something I played with.''
However, Hill insists that Coyne is not modelled on Nirvana's late lead singer Kurt Cobain but is a darker version of 70s stalwarts like Led Zeppelin front-man Robert Plant or Aerosmith's Joe Perry and Steve Tyler.
"One of the things the book is about is the way that a certain kind of unhappy person can use loud, angry music to butt against the bars of their cage,'' he says. "I think that comes through in Heart-Shaped Box the song. It's about being trapped and not knowing how to get out, being isolated. Jude's music comes out of his anger, from this sort of angry, isolated place.''
According to Hill, Coyne is unhappy because he has not died the traditional rock star early death. "He's got survivor's guilt,'' says Hill. "His band-mates are dead and he feels like he's let them down. It was supposed to be him who died and they were supposed to live on.''
- Extra, HoS
