Even the premise sounds hackneyed. Judas Coyne, a middle-aged rock star, orders an old suit online that its owner claims is haunted by a ghost. That's already a bad idea, but what's worse is that the ghost is the homicidal father of a girl whom Judas drove to suicide when he rejected her. When Judas realizes that the blade-wielding psychopath isn't just a figment of his imagination, he runs like hell, dragging along with him his hot goth girlfriend.
Heart-Shaped Box is essentially one long and unimaginative chase sequence. The villain is a Freddy Krueger clone, from his choice of implements to his inconvenient habit of haunting dreams. Because he doesn't obey physical laws, the chase lacks both purpose and effect: wherever Judas and his girl toy go, there he is! What a shocker!
To be fair, the horror genre thrives on convention, so the cliches in Heart-Shaped Box shouldn't be fatal. What really drags the book into mediocrity is the unconvincing development of the relationship between Judas and his girlfriend. Here, again, a comparison with Stephen King is inevitable. Even in his bad novels (though not in his absolute worst), King nails character development: from innocent to corrupt, coward to hero, uncertainty to grim determination. What makes this development work in King's novels is a certain organic relationship between the characters and the dilemmas they confront. Every crucial juncture of the plot tests the characters' flaws and self-perceptions (in fact, some of King's books, like Needful Things, are entirely about such testing). King's books are most successful when wacky external events both drive and reflect the characters' development.
In Heart-Shaped Box, that connection is broken. Because the villain is connected with one of Judas's past relationships, I think that the fight between Judas and the ghost is meant to reorient Judas's perspective toward his current relationship (with the goth girl). As it turns out, though, what Judas learns from the ghost is that it wasn't his fault that his ex-girlfriend committed suicide. If I were to guess the lesson that Judas is supposed to learn from that epiphany, responsibility would be way down on the list, and yet that's the path Hill sends Judas down. (To be honest, I'm not sure what kind of development Hill intended by telling the story of a past-his-prime rocker with heart problems who settles down with a really hot, very young girlfriend who's into kinky sex. This is not exactly Saul on the road to Damascus.)
As a final note, I also found distasteful the very prominent role that child abuse plays in Heart-Shaped Box. I didn't like it in A Thousand Acres, and I like it even less here. It's hard to invoke such a sensationalized topic without seeming exploitative, and Hill doesn't pull it off. Instead, it comes off as a tawdry and clumsy attempt to win readers' hearts: I can almost imagine Hill thinking, "Hey, my characters aren't sympathetic enough, so let's saddle them with the worst emotional trauma I can imagine." Ugh.
Copyright © 2009 Steven Wu 