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I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night…

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Not the labour leader and songwriter, though. A different kind of writer.

I’ve been on a Joe Hill binge, lately. It started with the comic collection Locke & Key: Welcome to Lovecraft, which I picked up because I liked the name and the art. It was a great story, very creepy and with a nice grounding touch of the mundane mixed in. This is, I think, of absolute importance with horror and modern fantasy: there needs to be enough of the mundane mixed in so that the horrific/fantastic elements stand out. Anyway, as I said, I really liked the comic and went looking for more information on the writer.

Turns out he’s got the next volume of the comic collection out: Locke & Key: Head Games. He’s also got a collection of short stories called 20th Century Ghosts and a novel called Heart Shaped Box.

So I bought and read them all.

Well, to be fair, I listened to the audio books for Ghosts and Box. But you get the idea.

I really, really like his stuff. He does amazingly good ghost stories, because he sticks with the idea of the uncanny and how it can affect us in so many ways, rather than just going right for the screamers.

He can do the screamers, too, as evidenced in Box. But he’s got more than that in his trick box.

I’m jumping all over the place. Here. Let me settle down and tell you a little about the stuff of his I’ve read.

  • Ghosts is one of the most varied, interesting, inspiring, and enjoyable collections of stories I’ve read. Not everything is a ghost story, and not every ghost story is scary. He can mix do charming innocence in a piece like Better Than Home without it getting cloying or naive. He can do cynical, self-aware horror in Best New Horror without you minding the fact that you know how it’s going to turn out. And he can pile on the weird and surreal in things like Pop Art and My Father’s Mask in a way that makes it seem like it fits in with reality. It’s a wonderful, heady mix of stories. I don’t like them all equally, but neither will you, and our tastes will vary.
  • Box is one of the best ghost stories that I’ve every read. Ever. There is a wonderful layering of history and backstory, strong characters (both living and dead), twisted secrets and motivations, some great scares and some more even greater creep-outs. It also has a strongly-hopeful tone to it, as you come to realize that its regrets even more than ghosts that are haunting the main character, and his quest to be free of the haunting is really a story of a man trying to find redemption and peace with his past. Does he make it? I can’t really tell you. Sometimes, as I think of the ending, I say yes, and sometimes I say no. And I love that.
  • Locke is a solid horror/modern fantasy comic. I loved the first collection, but felt the second collection didn’t have as strong a story to it. I mean, reading Head Games, it’s obvious that the book is setting the stage for what happens next: it’s a transitional episode, moving the major playing pieces into place. A few of the mysteries raised in Welcome to Lovecraft get… well, not really resolved, but you start to see the shape of them. So, because the story is not as self-contained in Head Games, it lacks the impact. I’m guessing, based on the track record, that this will take care of itself as the series progresses. I’m looking forward to the next collection.

One thing I noticed is that Hill deals with a lot of fathers in his writing. Many of them have powerful impacts on their children, for good or ill – they are powerful figures, even if they’re not always benevolent, whether through presence or absence. Their existence twists and shapes the stories they’re in. It crops up enough that I started to think of it as a theme, but that may be metathinking on my part.

See, we need to talk about the elephant in the room. Joe Hill’s father is Stephen King. And I have to wonder what sort of impact having Stephen King for a father must have on a writer’s work. So, you see, I may be imposing my own speculation on the writing, creating a theme that exists only in my head.

But you know what, Joe? I don’t care who your daddy is. I like his stuff a lot, but that’s not why I read yours. Why I will continue to read your stuff.

I read it because it’s good.

Duma Key

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I just finished Duma Key, by Stephen King. I’ve been wanting to write about it for a while, now, but forced myself to wait until I had finished the book; sometimes these things take a sharp turn south before the end, and I find my opinion of them changing.

But I like the book, right up to the end.

I have a sort of weird relationship with Stephen King’s books. Many years ago, when I was in high school, I started reading his novels – The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Carrie, Christine – and I loved them. Of course, I was about thirteen years old at the time, but that’s really neither here nor there.

When I graduated high school and moved into the city to go to university, I got a job at a book store. Some how, between the courses I was taking at university and the attitude of people at the store and the general tendency of people of that age to disparage anything popular, I developed this… contempt, I guess, is the only word… for the works of Stephen King.

This idea settled into my head, anchored deep, and somehow kept me from reading his stuff for many, many years. In fact, I didn’t start again until Wolves of the Calla came out. For some reason, this book got me to catch up on the Dark Tower series. And reading through The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, I felt my old disdain for the man’s work to bubble up to the surface. Of course, these two are the earliest books, and really the least polished of the entire series, in my opinion.

But I kept at it.

By the time I finished Wolves of the Calla, I had a brand new respect for Stephen King as an author. And really, the series is a wonderful tour through his development and growth as a writer, stretching as it does from his very beginning, up to his current writing. I started going back and reading all the novels I had missed. Some of them, like Tommyknockers and Cujo, I’m just not a fan of. Others, like Dreamcatcher and Needful Things, I really enjoyed. And a few, like Bag of Bones and It, were amazingly good.

Stephen King is the kind of author I love. He is a craftsman, building his story through careful use of his tools. You can see him finding new tools and learning to use them well as his career progresses, from rougher earlier novels to more polished recent ones. He talks about writing the way I think about writing. And he is completely unapologetic about doing what he needs to do to make the story work.

And he had some very interesting things to say in the second half of his speech to the National Book Foundation when they gave him a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003. Things that made me want to stand up and cheer, even though I was reading the speech six months after the fact.

Okay, enough generalities. What about Duma Key?

I loved it. Part of this is the fact that I listened to the audio book, and the reader (John Slattery) was very good.  At times, his voice even sounded like Stephen King’s.

Beyond that, though, it’s a good story. The main character was, to me anyway, immensely likable, flawed though he was. I’ve noticed that, since his own accident, King brings the ideas of near-fatal accidents and the pain and effort of recovery into his work a lot more often. If he was less good at it, it would be annoying, but his own experience of such things lets him write about it with a truth and clarity that you rarely see. So, too, in this novel. I found myself very invested in Edgar Freemantle’s long, painful recovery, and his striving to build a new life after his old one is destroyed.

And then, of course, the weirdness seeps in. It comes with laudable subtlety, building slowly, with a little bit of prophetic teasing allowed by the first-person voice and the conceit of the book having been written after the events. It’s slow and patient, and you hardly notice the strangeness increasing until you’re neck-deep in it.

I compare this to other books, where I find that King just couldn’t keep it in his pants. His Lovecraftian short story, Crouch End, struck me as being spoiled by his rampant rush to the bizarre.

Aside from being a chronicle of a man’s struggle with physical recovery and a shattered life, Duma Key is a ghost story. The ghosts are a little strange, and some of them are still living, but really it’s all about ghosts, whether of dead people or former lives, clinging when they should let go.

It’s also a Cthulhu Mythos story, though not overtly. But the dread power reaching out through the sea to touch the troubled mind of a sensitive artist? Tell me that’s not straight out of Lovecraft. King even makes a brief mention to Old Ones or Ancient Ones, and then just sort of lets it drop. He’s captured the feel, and the threat, and the unknowable horror that gave Lovecraft’s stories their power, without resorting to a worn pastiche, like Crouch End.

It’s also a story about the transformative power of art, with the metaphor made hellishly literal in this sense.

And, in the end, Duma Key is a story about loss. It’s a story about how much someone can lose, and still struggle on. And about what happens when they lose more than they can stand, but need to keep going anyway.

The ending is not happy, but it is good. Solid. Right.

I found a lot of similarities in tone, mood, and style with Bag of Bones, another Stephen King first-person novel about a haunted artist. There’s the same sort of immediacy to the tale, and a strange mix of sentimentality and cynicism about both men that make them very real in the imagination. And there are subtle things woven into the beginnings of each story that change meaning radically later on as more is revealed.

So. Duma Key. Good book. I recommend it.