Hill's crowning achievement in Horns is its beautiful, instantly captivating structure. The answers that Hill gives, however, are at best puerile, at worst deeply objectionable. Horns is a better book-tighter, better written, more engaging-than Heart-Shaped Box, and though still primarily an entertaining rather than thought-provoking work, it delves more deeply into its central questions, which are here about issues of theology as much as they are an investigation of Hill's genre. It was a good book, but not a very interesting one, and with Horns I hoped to discover whether the writer Joe Hill wanted to be was one I would want to follow. If 20th Century Ghosts skewed towards the literary end of the genre, Hill's first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, leaned towards the pulpy end, touching only lightly and with less nuance on the questions that were at the heart of his short stories. Hill wowed me with his debut collection, 20th Century Ghosts, a work that sits alongside Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others and Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners on the shelf of essential genre collections of the last decade, whose stories were both of and about the horror genre, constantly asking what it means to write or consume a genre rooted in misery and fear. I picked up Joe Hill's second novel, Horns, with the clear understanding that it would be my make-or-break experience with this author.
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