Horns, published by HarperCollins Canada, 9780061147951. You can buy it here (US) or here (CDN).

*Warning: Some spoilers ahead! Read at your own discretion!*

I’ll begin my review by saying that if you’ve never read Joe Hill’s work before, be it his short stories or his novels, and you’ve heard a lot of good things but you’re not quite sure if you should take the plunge, so to speak, and dive in, don’t go in with the expectation that, just because he’s Stephen King’s son, that their writing styles are going to be at all similar or that Hill’s stories will be high-octane supernatural thrillers. Where King’s corpus is peopled with a healthy mixture of stories in which sometimes, humans are the greatest villain (as with Misery), and sometimes it’s a supernatural force completely, as with Carrie, Christine, Salem’s Lot, It, etc, Hill’s body of work is reflective of the society in which we now live. Stories of girls being raped and murdered abound. And sometimes, the greatest mystery is who killed them and why.

Hill’s work, entrenched in the news stories of our modern culture, is a lot more toned down, a lot more focused on minimizing the supernatural element, while present, and emphasizing what makes certain humans rotten to the core, as with the character of Lee in Horns. It wouldn’t be right to expect a “fun” supernatural romp where the villains are clear cut, because they’re obviously supernatural creatures, and where humans are always the good guys–vampires versus humans, demons versus humans, us against them, etc. In fact, it wouldn’t be fair. The genius in Hill’s work lies in its simplicity–that he can make us care about a protagonist so conflicted and ‘not what he seems’ as Ignatius ‘Iggy’ Perrish.

Horns starts off with a simple sentence that is brilliant in its simplicity, because it doesn’t say what “terrible things” that Iggy has done, but it says he was drunk, and his name, which invokes the word ignis (for the Latin-inclined, it means “fire”). Point being, this opening works because it spells trouble in a subtle way. The very short scene ends with Iggy seeing that he’s grown, appropriately enough, a pair of honest to goodness horns. Under the circumstances, his reaction–that of fear and bewilderment–is to be expected, and understandable. But even though writers are advised not to start a novel or story with a character waking up to find something, i.e. a change in a set of circumstances, the way Hill handles it sets up a unique narrative arc that compels the reader to go on to find out how Iggy got his horns, but more importantly, why. Has he become the Devil? Or is he just a lower-ranking demon? Is he a demon at all?

True to form, he wastes no time indulging in blasphemy, urinating on the picture of the Virgin Mary which guards the shrine to his murdered girlfriend, Merrin Williams’, grave. Then, as Ig interacts with people–first, his sort-of lover, Glenna–he finds that people are, because of his horns, suddenly forthcoming about all of the vices that they have committed or that they would like to commit. And with one touch, Ig can see into their pasts and see their sins. At the hospital, he finds that a woman with a very bratty and loud daughter is having an affair with a Black man behind her husband’s back. The little girl has a very real and very raw desire to light a match and burn her mother down in bed.

But where most people would get a delightfully greedy sense of schadenfreude from suddenly being able to see the indiscretions and past mistakes of others–to know what their realest desires are–Ig doesn’t seem to derive any pleasure from this. In fact, he’s disgusted by what he hears and sees, including from the doctor who tries to examine him but ends up divulging how badly he wants to fornicate with his teenaged daughter’s best friend and to do some drugs with Ig.

As we go further on into the narrative, what intrigued me most was the issue of culpability: Ig is an unreliable narrator, because he’s not even sure of what he’s done, and several people, including every member of his family, believe that he murdered and raped Merrin. His grandmother in particular hates him for it, and wishes that Ig would go away. It’s unclear whether Ig actually killed Merrin, but we begin to question his motivations even more as Hill takes us on a bumpy ride through ‘did he or didn’t he?’ I didn’t believe him to be the culprit for a second, but Hill, through a series of flashback chapters, reveals the complicated relationship that Ig and Merrin shared, and how it all began, in church, when he saw her from across the room and fell in love with her beauty. But it’s clear that one of Ig’s friends, Lee, also has his sights set on the girl. When he asks Ig if it’s okay if he pursues her, Ig lies and acquiesces, but soon he takes back his statement and asks that Lee back off, especially because of Lee’s perverse fascination and sexual interest only in girls who are virgin-like, or “cherries” as he dubs them.

Ig harbours feelings of ill will and resentment toward the better-looking and more successful Lee, and doesn’t know quite what to make of him now, as an adult. But during a visit home to see his family, who all say that they hate him and wish he would leave because of the humiliation that they’ve suffered because of Ig, his brother, Terry, comes forward and says that he loves Ig and loved Merrin and knows that Lee killed and raped Merrin. Ig doesn’t know if he should believe this at first, but then becomes resolute in the idea that Lee did it, and he sets out to kill him as revenge.

An interesting bit of symbology that I found was Terry’s trumpet, which reminded me of the Archangel Gabriel’s horn, one that he sounds to announce great danger or to deafen a horde of demons. Also cool was the constant reference to snakes, especially in the part where Lee finally tells Ig that he didn’t save him and that instead, a large snake wrapped itself around him and pulled him out of the water.

The most interesting point in the flashback chapters, however, comes when Ig nearly drowns in a river and Lee helps him. Ig believes that Lee saved his life and feels a debt of gratitude toward him. Although when reading, I questioned Lee’s friendliness toward Ig, always thinking ‘this guy’s definitely got an angle,’ the way that Hill skilfully led me down a path of revealing just how Lee became the person that he is, and why, fascinated me in the disturbing descriptions of his actions. One of these involved him selling porn magazines, but the other, which showed Lee as having shades of being a homicidal maniac who enjoys the thrill of killing people and wishes he could do it more, revolted me. He reveals his suicidal tendencies, most of which stem from his strained relationship with his mother.

I also felt sorry for Ig (and Merrin) who both fell for Lee’s ‘nice guy’ ruse when in fact the younger Glenna revealed that Lee’s parents were rich and that Ig shouldn’t loan or lend him anything (although she’s talking about money, there are undertones of suggesting that Lee could steal people’s souls and lives if he wanted to). Eventually, Lee gets caught for stealing things from the mall (including the magazines he sells) and his eye suffers an accident, which later heals.

But although I found the chapters written from Lee’s point of view to be interesting, they seemed to lag in certain parts and I found myself wishing I could get on with the main narrative instead of going into his character and his past, but all of this serves as very important for later on, including a pivotal scene with Lee’s mother.

While I won’t spoil the ending for you or tell you who actually murdered Merrin (it should come as no surprise), I wanted to emphasize how effective Hill’s depiction of Lee was. This, more than any other “villain” (and I hesitate to use the term, because while Lee is supposed to be ‘the bad guy,’ Ig isn’t exactly an angel either, and this is a novel without a clear cut ‘you’re supposed to root for this guy and boo this one’) shows a great lesson in how to write a character who truly believes that his actions are justified, and why.

Even sadder is that, on Ig’s path to finding Lee and destroying him, Ig meets Dale, Merrin’s father, who has lost two daughters to premature deaths (Merrin’s sister, Regan, died at the age of 20 from a very rare and accelerated form of cancer). But after this interaction, and of seeing a frustrated father dealing with the loss of his children–something he hasn’t come to terms with and likely never will–Ig turns the tone around and, hilariously, takes to wearing a blue skirt. When questioned, he says, “Haven’t you ever heard of the devil in the blue dress?”

More interestingly, I found myself returning to the question of whether Ig is just a minor demon, if he is a demon, or if he’s really the Devil. Near the end of the novel, he returns to a ‘treehouse’ in which he and Merrin once spent a wonderful afternoon, and the first time he went there, he found what he assumed was Hebrew scripture. But the second time, now, with his horns, he sees the writing in English and it’s a note signed ‘L. Morningstar’–that was a very nice touch, because even though the question of why Ig has grown horns or who gave them to him or what purpose they serve is never answered, it becomes secondary to the story, which propels you forward into wanting, desperately, a sense of resolution for Ig. As to the ending, I won’t spoil it, but what I will say is that when Ig grew the horns and was able to enter a church, touch Merrin’s cross, etc, without repercussions, I longed to see Ig use them as a weapon. I wasn’t disappointed Although I will point out that the horns do their own damage to Ig, throbbing and overheating at times, which causes him great discomfort, especially as he’s trying to influence the thoughts of others. The book ends, appropriately, in the foundry where all of this began–where Merrin died, where her shrine is, and where Ig eventually returns.

Ultimately, I enjoyed reading Horns immensely. I found it well-written, engaging, interesting, and it made me question what was actually going on most of the time. I think that Ig is a fascinating, grey character who isn’t completely good, but who isn’t completely bad, either (in one scene, he helps a boy who he sees some other boys picking on. One of them is burning a cigarette hole into the weaker boy’s skin when Ig arrives and invokes fire to make the bullies go away only to be told by the ungrateful weaker boy that he ruined everything). But the best thing about the book is that, although it’s clearly horror, it isn’t over the top “This book is so nasty that I’m going to make you throw up all day” sort of exaggerated “too much” horror. I don’t enjoy gore for gore’s sake or brutal violence so disgusting that it serves no purpose to the plot other than to be disgusting. It doesn’t invoke dread or terror in me–it just makes me sick. And that’s not what I’m looking for in a horror novel. Many horror novelists can learn from Hill’s understated style of storytelling, which, although it is just as chilling as other horror novels, is so without having to rely on cheap thrills and nauseating images.

If you haven’t already, read Heart-Shaped Box, his first novel, which has the same subtle qualities and a plot just as intriguing. To find out more about Joe Hill, go to his website.

Watch this video in which Joe Hill discusses Horns.