My October is starting to shape up!

One of my favourite horror writers right now is Joe Hill, writer of Herat-Shaped Box, NOS4A2, and the comic book series Locke & Key, but my personal favourite of his novels is the 2009 title Horns.

Although I've known about the film adaptation for a while now, today I came across the trailer, and you've definitely got to check it out.

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.

Genre Character of the Week: Margaret Leigh

As a soon-to-be librarian myself, I’ve always been a sucker for librarians in fiction.  Whether the love interested of a time traveler on a mission in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 or the supportive mentor for a young girl in trouble in Jo Walton’s Among Others, I simply start to smile when any book I’m reading introduces a librarian as a character, rather than simply a stereotype.

In Joe Hill’s NOS4A2, that librarian is Margaret Leigh, and unlike a lot of fictional librarians I can think of, she has a pretty unique ability.

The problem is, I really don’t want to spoil any of the story of NOS4A2 – which went on sale yesterday, as the book is just so darn good. In simplest terms, I like Margaret because she comes across as a three-dimensional character, and even though there are shades of the mythical Cassandra in her, she seems very much a person with her own identity.

The novel follows a young woman, Victoria McQueen, through an incredibly dark experience in her childhood and then races forward to her own parenting years and puts her in an even darker spot, as this time her child is at risk.

The novel is definitely Dark Fantasy, is clearly influenced by the works of Stephen King (in a great way), and had me putting an immediate hold on the only Joe Hill book I haven’t read so far, his 2010 Novel, Horns.