Heart-Shaped Box: A Novel

I read his son's book.

Yeah, Horns and Heart-Shaped Box.

Yeah, I read those two.

I

didn't read Heart-Shaped Box.

Heart-Shaped

Box is

My name is Candy.

and i am shelly welcome back we are stepping into this dark leather jacket world of faded stadium lights vintage horror collections and sins that refuse to stay buried so buckle up because today we're opening up joe hill's haunted debut novel from 2007 heart-shaped box

yes do you want to talk about joe hill

I'll talk a little bit about it.

But

everybody has their...

He ends up with this heart-shaped box that is the ghost item.

And so he doesn't believe in any of it, but he ends up with one.

Yep.

And I've loved, you know, it's one of those things I knew him before he was cool, but, like, I read Heart-Shaped Box before I knew he was King's son, like, before it came out.

And I was like, man, this is really, really good.

And then when it came out, like, a year later, I – little pieces connected, and I re-listened to it, and I was like, yep, okay, absolutely.

They like to do, you know, King has mentioned Judas Coyne as just a musician.

Like, it's a fun back and forth that they kind of have this King shared universe.

They didn't make Heart-Shaped Box a movie, did they? No, I wish they would.

It's such a

Also, I've been reading, I've been reading, um, a h- a good horror story this, this, this month.

Um, Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box.

I have a feeling you read that, Mark.

I'm not really sure.

But now, now I'm endeavoring.

I want to, uh, I wanna read the short story, 'cause the few things I've read of Hill, uh, Joe, Joe Hill, like, uh, Heart-Shaped Box was, the first thing I read is, was fantastic.

Uh, good book if you want...

Uh, on book talk here with Gary and Andy.

[laughs]

Uh, go, go read Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, and read the Locke & Key series on the, uh, the graphic novels if you really want some good, to see how talented this writer really is.

Yeah.

And then you can dive into his other stuff, Fireman and Nos4a2, and he's got another book of short stories called 20th Century Ghosts.

I also enj- I still enjoy horror very much.

Um, Heart-Shaped Box from, um, Joe Hill is so fantastic.

If you haven't read it yet, it's been out for a while, but if you haven't read it yet, it's like old-school Stephen King.

It was so scary that you're like, "Ooh, I need to set this down for a little while." [laughs] It was very good.

Naomi is a minister, but both of his sons are writers.

The older son is responsible for major bestsellers like Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, NOS4A2, and The Fireman.

But if you walked into a bookstore in the mid-2000s, you would have absolutely no idea he was Stephen King's son.

The son opted for the exact same mechanism his father used in the '70s, but for the inverse reason.

Exactly.

He required the objective reality of the marketplace to validate his talent.

He achieved critical and commercial success with his 2004 collection, 20th Century Ghosts, and his 2007 debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, before the public relation to Stephen King was widely confirmed.

He earned his platform mechanically rather than inheriting it.