Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill. William Morrow, 2007. Has-been death metal rocker Judas Coyne uses his dwindling royalties to maintain a collection of macabre curiosities. Surfing the web late one night, he comes across an ad for a suit that’s supposedly inhabited by its owner’s ghost, and moves quickly to snap it up. Little does Coyne know that the bespoke spirit was the step-father of a groupie he once scorned, and that it’s looking to revenge the girl’s suicide. A multiple award-winner for his short fiction, 35-year-old Hill has an extraordinary sense for pacing and a lyric style that transcends the slasher genre. Still, his novel is filled with spine-tingling narrative thrills worthy of his heritage: Novelist Steven King is his father.
Selected Poems,
by James Fenton.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
In James Fenton’s poems, dark visions of modern life are exacted with simple diction and traditional form that seem to be the utterances of some long-ago oracle. Political oppression and the aftermath of war are treated with a cool distance that is even more chilling than hyperbole, and enriched by his first-hand experience as a war correspondent. This new collection of Fenton’s works is the perfect introduction to the British poet, who recently ended his tenure as Oxford Professor of Poetry. It provides ample evidence of his Audenesque range, and unpretentious clarity in the tradition of Larkin.
