What Annoys Me About Joe Hill

What happened to the idea that someone had to live the life of the damned, the addicted or the afflicted to have the words to paralyse your throat muscle?

I got to page ninety-three of Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box and stopped. I now knew what my first blog had to be about. Publishers, friends and internet gurus have all suggested that to get your work noticed — in the interests of ‘discoverability’ — you have to blog. Or tweet. Or pin something to something else. But what to blog about? What could I know and have the temerity to impart, that could possibly be of interest to people I don’t know and who live on the other side of the planet? (When you live in Tasmania, everything is on the other side of the planet…)

Joe Hill is what. Or whom. Heart-Shaped Box sits on the table beside me as I write this. It’s still open to page 93. So I’m about a quarter-way through. I don’t know how it ends and I’m not sure I care. Why? Because Neil Gaimon will reach into you and fondle the adolescent nodes of your imagination, Don Winslow will have you reaching for your gun while you cook a decent lasagne, but Joe Hill will grab you by the throat and have you peeping-out from under the bedcovers after you turn out the light (just to make absolutely sure that old man with the squiggly eyes hasn’t oozed out from the open book isn’t now looming over your bed) and remind you just how god-damn much you really do still believe in ghosts. You thought you had buried the belief long ago and deep in the ground, but Joe Hill is the grave robber. So he’s done his job. I don’t need to finish the book to know how good it is and how good he is.

I’m old enough to remember Joan Baez singing ‘Joe Hill’ at Woodstock and yet the bastard still frightened me. A revelation: Courage does not arrive with advancing years. I also like to read a book that not only takes me on the ubiquitous ‘journey’ that every second pop star blathers about, but also sneaks up on me and whispers, ‘Just pause for a minute Steve and check out the writing.’

Because I’m interested in the writer’s craft, Heart-Shaped Box delivers me a bonus. I do stop every few pages and think, ‘Damn, that was a great way to describe innermost fear, or a damaged soul or the eyes of the dead. I suspect Joe will arrest you along on the way too. There is no extra charge for it.

So, what annoys me about Joe Hill? He’s only about forty years old. That’s what. What happened to the idea that someone had to live the life of the damned, the addicted or the afflicted to have the words to paralyse your throat muscle? He’s forty and will write twenty or thirty more books that will all probably do the same thing. So now he’s going to cost me money, because I’ll have to buy ‘em and read ‘em and admire ‘em and be scared wobbly by ‘em, even when I’m living on a state pension. That means I’ll get to buy fewer electric guitars and probably forego that cool Fender Blues Deluxe amp that my wife doesn’t know I’ve been coveting. Thanks Joe. No, really, thank you.