Heart Shaped Box: A Retrospective View

Joe Hill's Heart Shaped Box was my favorite book this semester. It is dark fantasy at its best, melding together the Fantasy and Horror genres perfectly. Its ghastly real wold subject matter allows it to appeal to a broader audience than some of the other books that we read this semester, but the fantastic elements really shone. The characters of the novel were vivid, coloring their surroundings and generating a almost film-like tone. The blending of magic traditions was an interesting way to bring the broader world in which the story took place to live.

The action, the metaphors, and the fast pacing of the plot served to make this novel extremely readable and worth discussing.