It all started when I woke up with horns...

...is what the main character in HORNS (by Joe Hill) experiences.


It's been a rough year for Ignatius Parrish. The love of his life has been murdered a year before and everyone thinks it was him. Generally his life sucks and then... HORNS. Just little ones, but horns nonetheless. What's worse is, they're still poking out of his head after the hangover fades and people suddenly tell him awful, awful things.

The parade of awful continues until someone blurts out (uncontrollably) who REALLY killed Ig's girlfriend- at which point Joe Hill dons a cloak and proceeds to write his hands off to a fantastic end. I personally binge read it in a four-hour window of compulsive page-turning and I'm pretty sure most people would do the same.

Worse still, it made me cry. Like a weenie. Ig and dead girlfriend had a lot of unfinished business, which gets solved for him at long last near the end. This was written so earnestly, so tenderly, that my girl-brain couldn't take it and I bawled as I read it.

When I finished it I couldn't help but sing its praise to everyone I could and now I find myself thrusting the book enthusiastically at EVERYONE- even people who wandered over to Galaxy looking for German Books.

So READ it- Sure it's horror - but with good horror there's an awful darkness that comes out of the characters, more than the situation. Hill (King Junior) seems to know as well as his father does that people make their own hell- and for Ig the horns help it surface. Also, Hill is a witty guy who has a knack for adding a dash of humour here and there- just to remind us that there are skeletons in everyone's closet.