Heart-Shaped Box

Interviews & Essays

An Interview with Joe HillQ: What do you make of the popularity of the ghost story across cultures and through time?Ghost stories are an instrument for thinking about death, for looking at the big question, what happens when we die? At bottom, every interesting work of fiction is an investigation into life's most basic questions, like why do two very different people sometimes fall in love, or why do terrible things sometimes happen to good people. Stories operate as thought experiments, and we use them to safely explore the kinds of feelings and situations we'd rather avoid in real life.How many stories begin with the death of a loved one? Must be thousands. Most of us feel ill even thinking about the people we love dying, but it's going to happen someday, and stories give us a chance to prepare for how that's going to feel. Not very far into Heart-Shaped Box, my protagonist, Jude, an aging rock star, learns about the death of someone who once mattered to him, very much. And as the story goes along, Jude is forced to revisit other losses, such as the deaths of beloved bandmates, and the slow, unhappy, dwindling-out of his mother. The reader gets to piggyback on Jude's emotions, and maybe learn something about their own in the process. Also, fear is a little bit of a rush. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be any money in rollercoaster rides. They offer a hard, exciting jolt to the system, just the thing to kick the end-of-the-day, back-from-work-and-there's-nothing-on-TV doldrums.Q: Who's the hero of this story? Jude and his girlfriend Georgia both get their heroic moments, although at first blush neither one really comes off as the heroic type. Jude is a burned-out, nihilistic rock star, in his fifties. He's cruel to the people who love him. He's tired of music. He occupies himself with his dogs and his sick collection of occult artifacts: Aleister Crowley's childhood chessboard, an authentic witch's confession. Georgia is spoiled and selfish and doesn't think much about the consequences of her actions.But one of the things I love in fiction is a good reversal. There's more to Jude and Georgia than first appears, more to them than anger and self-involvement. There's a hidden decency too, and deep reservoirs of courage and humor. Heart-Shaped Box is, at least in part, a mystery, only the question isn't whodunit, but whoarethey?To answer the question, though, if I had to pick a clear, definite hero in this story -- well, I'd have to pick two: Angus and Bon, Jude's dogs. The book features some pretty raw scenes of dog-on-man combat. Not to mention some dog-on-ghost combat. Heart-Shaped Box is really a very straightforward horror-chase tale, mixed with Marley and Me. If it wasn't too late, I might want to retitle it The Texas Marley Massacre.Q: Do you have dogs yourself, and what's your relationship to them? I have one dog. My relationship to her is I feed her, and she pees on things and gets into the garbage. If a deadly ghost comes hunting for me, and she's my last line of defense, I'm in trouble. The dogs in Heart-Shaped Box are wish-fulfillment pets. Q: You seem to know a lot about classic muscle cars, the private lives of rock and roll stars, and the south. What's your approach to research?I try not approach it. As a rule, I make an effort not to do any, unless I absolutely must. But if research is necessary, I try and prepare for the big exam by doing all the necessary reading, like any good student. And because reading a few books is no replacement for real-life experience, I'll run the story by a few experts on whatever the subject is, and make sure I got it right. Recently I wrote a short story featuring a young woman who served in Iraq. I read the hell out of the subject before I wrote the story, but more important, I turned to some veterans of the war, to make sure I represented the experience as accurately as possible. On the subject of hard rock, which figures prominently in Heart-Shaped Box, that's an area I began researching when I was about fourteen. We're talking years of intensive study here.Q: What role does music play in the book?One of the things Heart-Shaped Box is about is the way that a certain kind of very unhappy person will use loud, angry music as a way to armor himself against the world's sharp edges. Jude has used his music as a kind of armor for most of his life. Also, sometimes as a bludgeon.I'm always wondering why people care so much about art, about books and movies and music. We're a culture just drowning in our own entertainment and it seems everyone is passionate about some form of artistic expression: a particularly funny sitcom, a comic book, a certain CD. But what's it for? And so Heart-Shaped Box, and a bunch of my short stories, are at least in part about art itself, and how sometimes it can be a tool, and sometimes it can be a weapon, and sometimes it can be a low-grade pain reliever. Like Excedrin, without the bitter aftertaste. Q: You've won some awards for your short fiction. What's the difference between short fiction and novel-length work? Well, Heart-Shaped Box is really my second book. My first was a collection of stories, 20th Century Ghosts. It was published as a limited edition in England, although I'm happy to say that William Morrow has plans to rerelease the book over here in the States, sometime down the road.The short stories in 20th Century Ghosts taught me how to write the novel. For a lot of writers -- well, for me, anyway -- the short story is a workshop, a place to try new ideas, take chances, and sharpen the tools of the craft. A novel requires a tremendous investment of time and emotional energy. If you write a bad one, you don't get to have those two years of your life back. So a short story is a good place to test-drive riskier concepts.While writing Heart-Shaped Box, I always felt very sure of where I was going. I had written all these other ghost stories, and stories of suspense, working on the tales that went into 20th Century Ghosts, and I was confident that I knew what I was doing, when I began to mess with those elements on a larger scale.Q: What were the influences on the writing of this book?I had a head full of Charles Portis's True Grit while I was working on Heart-Shaped Box. They're very different stories, but there's a similarity to the underlying architecture. True Grit is about a fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie Ross, who in the 1870s sets off to find and kill the man who murdered her father; to help her she hires Rooster Cogburn, a bad-tempered, trigger-happy federal marshal and a drunk. And the story maps both their search for the killer, and the slow, cautious development of their friendship. Heart-Shaped Box is very different stuff, but it's also a road story, and also about two difficult, hard-edged people -- Jude and his girlfriend Georgia -- gradually coming to care for one another.A less obvious influence was the Swamp Thing stories of Alan Moore. Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing collected a batch of supernatural tales easily as impressive as Clive Barker's Books of Blood. My version of the South in Heart-Shaped Box isn't the real South -- it's Alan Moore's twisted reimagined South, something I referred to when I named Jude's hometown Moore's Corner. Q: The story is dominated by Craddock McDermott, the ghost Jude buys on the Internet and who then pursues Jude across three-hundred odd pages. But there are some other ghosts that wander through the book. Why did you bring in so many other haunts?Ghosts are a sturdy metaphor for the way the past keeps impinging on the present. Before Judas Coyne was a million-dollar heavy metal musician, he was Justin Cowzynski, a lonely, miserable country boy with no prospects and no future. But at nineteen he climbed on a bus for New York City, left Louisiana and a tortured childhood behind, and when he stepped off the Greyhound forty hours later, he had invented this whole new persona for himself, and a rock star name to go with it. And so the story is in part an investigation of whether you can really make such a clean break with your past. Jude has spent his whole life walking away from the things he can't bear to deal with anymore. He walked away from a marriage. He walked away from an important relationship with a girl named Anna, who later kills herself. His closest friends are all dead, something else he doesn't want to think about. Jude is already a haunted man, even before he buys the ghost online. And all these spirits keep rising up around him. That's the power of the ghost story. The dead won't stay dead. Like the man said, not only is the past never over, it isn't even past.Q: What are you working on now?As a rule, I try and stay away from saying too much about works in progress. It's something of a superstition with me. Bad things seem to happen when I talk about unfinished work. But I've got a pair of new novels, one a dark fantasy for younger folks, and one a psychological thriller for grown-ups, both in various stages of completion. And I've been chipping away at a few short stories as well.Q: Do you believe in ghosts?Sometimes yes, sometimes no, how's that for an unsatisfying answer? I don't believe in them at noon. I'm a little less sure at one in the morning.