Writer vs Artist

the eternal dilemna

I Been Trapped Inside for, uh, About a Week.

Just finished reading Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill.

Recommended by Mark Askwith who heard about it from Neil Gaiman. This book. It’s cracking. Maybe you’re wondering, hey, when was the last time I read a horror novel, in the sense of an un-put-down-able page turner that made me want to hang on for the ride cause I have to find out what happens next. Cause you enjoy books and that’s how you first got sucked into them when you were a teenager—those books lying around the house that you weren’t supposed to read. Maybe it was Misery. Maybe it was Eyes of the Dragon.

Well this is like that. It’s got that momentum. And while it’s not exactly scary, I was more terrified reading something like House of Leaves, it certainly left it up in the air what the final fate of it’s protagonists would be. Story follows a fictional rocker, sort of an Alice Cooper type figure who buys a ghost on ebay, that comes in a dead man’s suit, that ends up haunting the bejeezus out of him and his goth groupie girlfriend.

Simple really. Escapist, sure.

Only about, what, less than a dozen characters in the whole book, and focuses on mainly just the couple and the ghost. Real tight. Driving. Like a locked room.

Maybe it’s the thing for you?

More on the go. Still Reading Jim Thompson books– got a massive omnibus given to me by Slates.

Also read the Ruins, which was an even more interesting experiment in horror. Shame though, that when you talk to anyone about it who’s remotely heard of it they say, “is that the movie with the plants?” Yes!   But… so much more than that!

Genuinely horrible stuff going on in it, that’s entirely driven by character. It’s another locked room, except that the tourist protagonists happened to be pinned out on a hill in a Mexican jungle rather than trapped in a farmhouse in the American midwest. but the principles the same. And all that happens, it’s entirely and horribly their fault.  Makes it really painful to read in many places, as strengths become weaknesses when exposed to the stark and the strange. Much to think about.

So much horror so little time…