Horns by Joe Hill Review

Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King, who is also writing the very cool comic series "Locke & Key".

As a new writer, I'm often left surprised at things that get published vs. what I am often told / taught about the business of writing. This is one of those books, that if it were mine and I was offering it for submission or critique, I would expect it to be handed back to me with a long list of corrections. It's a good idea. It starts off with a bang and it rolls right along. In fact, it gives me a lot of info and a lot of the gimmick right off and it got me hooked. As this is very early Joe riding on his father’s coattails, you can tell that the first part of Horns was probably a short story idea he had tucked in a drawer and expanded it to a novel on request.

Then BANG! It stops dead with a flashback. A LONG flashback, A LOT of flashback... a flashback of stuff we already knew, but now we're going to get it full length. This is why I think it was a short story originally and in trying to expand it to a novel, he either didn’t trust himself to just go with that singular vision, or didn’t trust the reader to ‘get it.’ As for me as a reader, I skipped it. As I skipped every other flashback. These were unnecessary. Joe could have given us all this info in the main character Ig's connection with other folk as his 'affliction' was explored. Again and again the action STOPS DEAD with long laborious flashback sequences. What started off as a race car turns into a scooter. I literally skipped the majority of these flashbacks, lost very little of the plot and reduced the book length by half.

It’s not to say that utilizing flashback in such a way is inherently bad - good writing is good, bad writing is bad. This, however, didn’t cover new ground and felt unnecessary, especially after the immediacy of the start of the book. The bulk of the flashbacks covered what I already knew and anything that was fresh material could have been discovered by Ig as we went along. If you want to do all that back history, then put the book into chronological order, make the book more of a slow burn as we weave our way in and out of these characters lives until the final tragic events unfold. That would have made it more of a papa King book, while the punch in the face of the intro was more of an original thought.

There are also a lot of other grammar choices and font choices and style choices that one would think an editor would have worked with him on before it went to press. I think his lineage may be getting him a free pass or two on bad ideas.

That being said, it's not horrible. It's a good idea, and when it's rolling along, you want to go exploring with Ig, you want it to be a murder mystery where bad people get their comeuppance at the hands of this monster. You want him to spend time trying to figure out his 'powers' and how they work and who they affect. That could have been the bulk of the novel - a bigger novel - a better novel. "What would you do if you woke up and found not only your girlfriend horribly murdered, but also your memory blank from the last few days and that you were GROWING HORNS OUT OF YOUR HEAD." There's your story. Learn as Ig learns, every clue is double cross, and he learns just what 'wisdom of the masses' actually means. This could have been dark and philosophical, horrifying and thought provoking, and many other things all at the same time.

I give him a B+ for the Idea, and a "Left wanting much more" C+ for the execution.