4 out of 5 Stars
- Minor usage of the word hang instead of hung
- Short chapters
- Really talking about heavy metal, not death metal
Judas Coyne used to be the biggest thing in metal. He had legions of fans and groupies That was before two of the band members died. Now, he lives in his house and has collected one of the world’s largest collections of macabre and occult things ever seen. He has a hangman’s noose that was used on a witch, a trepanned skull of another, and his most prized, an actual snuff tape. He has it pretty much easy. That is, until he finds a suit online that is supposedly haunted. Once he buys the suit he learns that the ghosts of your past, they catch up with you.
In his debut novel, Joe Hill astonishes me. He creates a backdrop of the ‘aged metal god’ so well that I have a hard time not thinking that it’s Ronnie James Dio, Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Zombie, or one of the many dark men that have populated the popular culture of metal for decades. But I’m getting ahead of myself. You are probably wondering, just who is Joe Hill, and why should you care?
Well to put it simple Joe Hill is a pseudonym for Joe Hillstrom King. That’s right, the son, and heir to the throne, of Stephen King. It seems that Mr. Hill wanted to get his own success before revealing who his parents were, and this was smart because while he is Mr. King’s son, this man knows what he’s doing and comparing him to his father is very uncouth. Yes, of course, he has a lot of King’s writing style. But what he does, he does well. It kept me turning the page and reading it ‘til the wee hours of the morning. So, my hat goes off to this man. He has a strong start and I can’t wait to read his next one.
The story proper starts out introducing us to Jude, and his humble abode. It seems he wants to live out the rest of his days in a rather quaint silence, with his two dogs Bon and Angus, his manager Danny (for the life of me I can’t remember the manager’s last name, and as far as I can recollect he only calls him Danny), and his girlfriend Marybeth whom he has nicknamed “Georgia” because that’s where she’s from. It seems he does this a lot with his girlfriends as he recollects the girl before her being “Florida”. Anyway the opening scene of the book revolves around Danny and Jude finding the suit of the dead man on an online auctioning site. It’s not ebay but for all intents and purposes it resembles it. They automatically buy the suit and, trust me when I say, things get rather out of hand once the suit arrives. Really much of the story revolves around the suit and just who owns it. I can’t help but think that Joe Hill did a lot of research into Heavy Metal’s past of groupies because this is a rather ingenious way to get back at a man.
Joe Hill does a masterful job of making us care for this group of misfits, even if it doesn’t seem like you would care for a guy who has a Snow White and the Seven Dwarves painting done by John Wayne Gacy. The one underlining thing I can say about Judas is the fact that you don’t really get to know that Judas isn’t his real name until later in the novel but you know his parents didn’t name him Judas that it was a persona that the man created. Trust me when I say, the name comes into play in a lot of the main characters past. I can’t really go into it without giving away at least one of the most poignant scenes in the book to me.
Now that I’ve given you enough praise for the man there are some minor flaws, and to be honest I don’t know if it lies in the hands of Joe or his editor. The use of the word hanged instead of hung for instance. He might be right in using it and I might be wrong in thinking it would be hung instead of hanged but it still clanged in my head every time I ran across the word which was only every so often, so it’s minor really. Another flaw that I found was his thing with death metal seemed to be more heavy metal. He doesn’t really go into the lyrics of the songs but it seems more like he’s talking about heavy metal than it’s darker brother, but that’s just me. Also when you get to the last act he seems to shorten the chapters down to half pages and I don’t get that but hey when you’re used to Tolkien lengths of chapters and when I’m really reaching far to say that the flaws are these three things? I honestly think that says a lot for an author when his only mistakes are one word, some chapter length issues and maybe but not for sure the categorization of the music.
But putting those three things aside, the story is very moving, very haunting and actually pretty damn scary at times. I can’t give enough praise to the man for adding something that will go down in my book as second only to his dad’s The Stand
