By Ike Beal
The line between morality and evil has always shifted over time – what was considered heroic then, might be horrific now; the Devil doesn’t fall into that category. Despite all the praise he gets, he’s never gotten much love; especially in literature. Old Mephistopheles can’t seem to get a break, because it’s easy to turn him into a shallow child; he can be contrasted with any hero, or interchangeable with any other horrible villain. But give him a good writer, and people will feel sympathy for the Devil.
Joe Hill was one such writer; he rocked the literary world with his arrogance and unique style, Hill took weird concepts and incorporated them into understandable characters to create a grand and beautiful image. The most famous example is “Horns”, which was made into a terrible movie that poorly reproduced the original book and lived up to the cliché of “the book is better than the movie”.
Unburied hatred aside, Horns revolves around Iggy Perrish; a man grieving the brutal murder of his soul mate Merlin Williams, and as if the grieving process wasn’t enough, he is accused of the crime. On top of that, he wakes up with two lumps of flesh on either side of his head.
These horns cause those around him to confess their darkest desires, expelling like vomit the secrets that reside in all human souls. Now, despised, hated, abused and framed, what else can a good man do but take revenge on such a godless town?
Hill has created a brilliant novel: tight, efficient, and enduring, with Horns’s prose being serious and forthright. The pace of the story and the way it is told reflect this mentality; the story is stripped of its excesses and made lean and effective – all in the service of the narrative.
While Horns is an engrossing novel, it has its share of problems: the predominantly flashbacks—while well-written and endlessly charming—often disrupt the pacing and kill any forward momentum. Don’t get me wrong, the Sandlot-style imagery is welcome in such a bleak story, and the main plot, which already struggles to fit its length at times, needs to be better integrated into it to keep things flowing. The setup also forces the encounters in the story to become repetitive at times; one starts to detect the pattern early on, at which point a sense of monotony sets in that becomes fairly prevalent in the second half.
Despite my complaints, Horns is worth a look; even though it’s weird and disturbing, it’s a masterpiece that uses deep characters and light horror elements to create a world that’s both unbelievable and as real as the world we live in.
Order yours here.
score: 4.5/5
