Genre Character of the Week: Ig Parrish

So I literally just finished Joe Hill's second novel, Horns about five minutes ago.  Although it was his second novel, and I'm usually quite big about readings an author's work in publishing order, I was introduced to the author with his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box (excellent, by the way), and then moved on to his comic book series, Locke & Key.

Horns follows our Genre Character of the week: Ig Parrish, a young man who has just woken up from a really bad drinking binge and finds he now has horns growing out of his head.

Ig has spent the last year of his life being a "person of interest" in the rape and murder of his long time girlfriend, so it's safe to say he is pretty much hit bottom at the point the novel begins.  The interesting thing about the horns, however, is that people seem to act differently around Ig now, telling him secrets they would never share with anyone else, and asking for his permission to act on their darkest impulses.

What I really like about Ig is that through this entire strange, hellish novel, he always comes across as a real person, a three dimensional human being doing his best to understand a world that no longer makes any sense at all.

A film adaptation of the novel will be coming out later this year, and I'm definitely interested in seeing how it turns out.