Title: Horns
Author: Joe Hill
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 440
Rating 4 /5
I picked this book up at a charity shop and didn’t actually get a chance to read it for a while because my girlfriend borrowed it from me and read it first. It was her first Joe Hill and my fourth, but I think we both enjoyed it, and I’m also pretty happy with this one because it was picked out for me by my cat.
The story basically follows a dude called Ig who wakes up one morning to discover that he has horns on his head. They basically cause people to reveal all of their deepest, darkest secrets to him, and so we get to experience what that would be like. At the same time though, it also heads back to the past when Ig and his friends were kids, before his girlfriend was murdered and everyone thought he did it.
It’s a good job that it does this, because if the whole novel just followed what happened with the horns then I think it would have started to get boring. At the same time, it did feel as though it took a long time for all of the different threads to come together. The payoff was worth it, and that doesn’t always happen with books like this (see my review of Bag of Bones by Stephen King, Hill’s father). But at the same time, there was just a little something missing that stopped me from giving it a 4.5 or a 5.
Still, it was pretty good, and it was fun to do it as a sort of real life buddy read. We’re going to watch the movie together at some point, too. The only major problem that I spotted was a big old plot hole which could have stopped the whole book from happening, but perhaps I’m just nitpicking. Ig’s brother’s blood was planted at the scene and they had Ig in custody as a suspect. I’m pretty sure they would have run DNA tests, and that would have shown that it wasn’t a match for Ig but that it was almost certainly a close family member.
But all in all, I was a fan of it, and I’m looking forward to getting to some more of Joe Hill’s stuff in the future. In the meantime, I’d say that it’s not his best and it’s not his worst, but it was good enough to keep me reading. And I’m looking forward to seeing how they turned it into a movie, too. They have a few different options.
