Blind (novel)
Blind (English original title: Heart-Shaped Box ) is a novel by the American author Joe Hill . The novel is a ghost story and can be assigned to the genre of horror literature . It was published in the United States in 2007, and the German translation was published that same year. With the novel, Joe Hill, son of the successful writer Stephen King , won the award for the best first novel at the Bram Stoker Awards 2007 , the International Thriller Awards and the Locus Awards and was awarded the category at the Bram Stoker Awards Roman also nominated.
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The former rock star and singer of the band Jude's Hammer , Judas Coyne, lives in seclusion on a farm after the death of several of his musicians. He is unproductive, bored and unemotional and lives in changing relationships with young “Goth Girls” whom he names after the states they come from. He currently lives with the former stripper Marybeth, called Georgia, and his two dogs Bon (never) and Angus and collects macabre things. One day, his assistant Danny discovers an internet auction where a ghost is being auctioned. Coyne lets him buy this one. A few days later he gets an old suit delivered to which the spirit is bound according to the auction. While unpacking the suit, Marybeth stabs her thumb, which ulcerated over the course of the story, and they put the suit with the box in the closet.
A short time later, Jude heard a voice on the radio telling him that he was going to die, but ignored it as a radio joke. One night he has the feeling that one of the dogs is in the house and looks in the house to see where the noises he has heard come from. That night he first saw the ghost of Craddock James McDermott, who was sitting in the suit he had bought on a chair outside his bedroom. The next morning he and Danny call the woman who sold him the suit: Jessica Price. Jessica Price confronts him about sending her stepfather's ghost to get revenge on the suicide of her sister Anna May, a former partner of Jude, whom he sent back because of her depression and who took her own life after her return should have. Craddock McDermott is said to have taken revenge on Jude as a ghost and drive him to his death.
In the following days there are further encounters with the ghost of Craddock, who is increasingly terrorizing Jude and Marybeth. He tries to gass Jude in his car, an old '65 Mustang GT Fastback. Jude can only be saved because of Marybeth and Danny's barking dogs. Marybeth burns the suit while Jude sleeps and dreams of the ghost and its manipulations. When he wakes up, there's a ghost-owned Chevrolet pickup in front of his house, and Jude gets a call from Danny the ghost caused him to hang up and who is now lost. Immediately after the call, Craddock tries to get Marybeth to shoot herself while she is watching a snuff movie from Jude's collection. Jude is able to prevent it, but shortly afterwards he comes under the influence of the spirit, which tries to force him to kill Marybeth. Jude can evade hypnosis by ramming a piece of glass in his right hand and then fleeing to the dogs outside and letting them out of the kennel. The two dogs pounce on the ghost and Jude watches how ghostly ghosts jump out of the dogs' physical bodies and attack Craddock.
Jude and Marybeth decide to travel to Florida with the dogs and force Jessica Price to rid them of the ghost. On the trip they are followed by the pick-up and there is another incident with Craddock in a breakfast café; However, as long as the two are near the dogs, they are safe from attack. They decide to stop at Marybeth's grandmother Bammy and ask the late Anna May for help and protection with the help of an Ouija board . They reach Anna and learn that her death was not a suicide. Shortly after their onward journey they meet George Ruger, a used car dealer who sexually abused Marybeth as a little girl for payment and beat up the Jew. Later that night they arrive at Jessica Price's and wait until the next morning to surprise her after leaving their daughter. They penetrate the house, overwhelm the woman and in the dispute, Jude begins to understand the real context of Anna's death: As a child, she was sexually abused by her stepfather under hypnosis and he continued this with Jessica Price's daughter, Reese . When Anna understood the context and threatened her stepfather and her sister with clarification and complaint in order to protect Reese, she was murdered by them. In Jude they saw the trigger for their "misfortune" and wanted to take revenge on him accordingly. While they are fighting with Jessica in the kitchen, Reese Price comes back and points a gun at the intruders. She shoots the bitch Bon, with a second shot she shoots Jude's hand. While escaping to the car, Jessica Price races her car into the Mustang and runs over the second dog, Angus, whom Marybeth heaves seriously injured into the back seat; the dog dies on the way.
Jude and Marybeth flee to Jude's father's farm and are let in by his caretaker Arlene Wade. She prepares Jude a bed in his old room next to his dying father. While Jude is lying there, the spirit enters the lifeless body and attacks Jude with it. Marybeth comes to his aid in the kitchen. The old man slits her throat with a knife and she asks Jude to open a door for Anna. He paints a door on the floor with her blood and after he has painted a handle, Anna penetrates in a torrent of light and pulls Craddock's ghost into the light. Jude is rescued and learns at the hospital that Marybeth also survived, seriously injured. In the end of the book, the two get married and after a few years get a visit from Reese, whose mother was arrested, and support her.
There are several places in the novel that Jude and Marybeth look back and talk, especially about Jude's previous life when he was still living on his abusive father's farm, and tours he went on with and with his band he met numerous musicians and fans. Here, references to other well-known musicians are made, especially Ozzy Osbourne and Trent Reznor . Numerous other reviews also deal with the relationship with Anna May, who repeatedly asked him questions and increasingly fell into depression, as well as the beginning of the relationship with Marybeth, whom he met as a Goth stripper.
people
The central characters in the plot of the novel are the aging rock star Judas Coyne and his partner Marybeth and the spirit of the preacher and hypnotist Craddock James McDermott. A few other people also play a role in the story:
- Judas Coyne, called Jude and actually Justin Cowzynski. Jude is a successful rock star, who has been little active for a few years and has withdrawn to his court. He buys the ghost at an internet auction and is then pursued by it.
- Marybeth Kimball, called Georgia, a former goth stripper and current partner of Judas Coyne. She stays with Jude when the ghost pursues and tries to kill them and drives him to Florida.
- Angus and Bon, Judas Coyne's two sheepdogs, accompany Jude and Marybeth and are able to attack the ghost. Bon is shot dead by Reese Price, daughter of Jessica Price, when Jude and Georgia break into their apartment, and Angus dies shortly afterwards after being hit by Jessica Price.
- Craddock James McDermott, the stepfather of Anna May and Jessica Price and former preacher and hypnotist. After his death, Jessice Price auctioned his ghost to Jude, ostensibly as revenge for her sister's suicide. The ghost of Craddock tries to kill Jude and Marybeth and pursues them on their trip to Florida.
- Danny Wooten, Judas Coyne's assistant and manager. Wooten draws Coyne's attention to the auction of the ghost and buys it for him. He is later driven to suicide by the ghost.
- Anna May McDermott, known as Florida, was Jude's last partner before Marybeth. He sent her home when she was becoming increasingly depressed and a burden to him. She was the sister of Jessica Price and the stepdaughter of Craddock James McDermott. After returning to Florida, she gets into an argument with her stepfather, who has hypnotized and sexually abused her and her niece for years, and her sister, who kill them together and make it seem like a suicide.
- Jessica Price, sister of Jude's former girlfriend Anna; Jessica Price sells Jude the suit, and with it her stepfather's ghost, ostensibly in revenge for her sister's suicide after Jude sent her home.
- Reese Price, the daughter of Jessica Price.
- Bammy, the grandmother of Marybeth, whom Jude and Marybeth visit on their way to Florida. In their home they use the Ouija board to get in touch with the ghost of Anna May.
- Martin Cowzynski, Jude's father. The farmer who mistreated Jude as a boy is dying when Jude and Marybeth meet him. While Jude lies next to him in the room, the ghost of Craddock invades his father and attacks Jude with his body in order to kill him.
- Arlene Wade, Martin Cowzynski's housekeeper and carer.
- George Ruger, a used car dealer who sexually abused Marybeth as a child. Jude beats him up on her trip to Florida.
- Nan Shreeve, called Tennessee, Jude's attorney and a former partner. After the events she takes care of the formalities for Jude.
reception
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The novel by Joe Hill, the son of the successful writer Stephen King , was published in 2007 as his first novel under the title Heart-Shaped Box . Hill had published a short story collection in 2005 under the title 20th Century Ghosts (German title: Black Box , Heyne Verlag 2008), for which he received several awards.
The title Heart-Shaped Box is borrowed from the song of the same name by the band Nirvana , released in 1993 on the album In Utero . In the novel, he refers to an empty box of chocolates where Jude Coyne kept a collection of cartridges as a teenager. In the same year the German translation was published by Heyne Verlag under the title Blind , translated by Wolfgang Müller .
The novel was nominated at the Bram Stoker Awards 2008 in the categories of first novel and novel and was able to win the former, but the winner in the novel category was The Missing by Sarah Langan . The Locus Award and the International Thriller Award also went to Joe Hill for Heart-Shaped Box in the First Novel category . The novel became a bestseller and on April 8, 2007, it was ranked 8th on the New York Times bestseller list in the "Hardcover Fiction" category after six weeks.
Heart-Shaped Box has been reviewed in several newspapers and magazines , including the New York Times and Time Magazine . Although the book appeared under a pseudonym that does not suggest Joe Hill's father, Stephen King, and although no reference was made to this relationship in either the novel or press material, this was known to many reviewers and used in most of the reviews. At the same time, however, the independence of the novel and the work of Joe Hill is repeatedly emphasized and the comparison usually culminates with the fact that Joe Hill and his novel Heart-Shaped Box do not have to fear the comparison with Stephen King. Lev Grossman of Time Magazine emphasized in his review that King has probably passed everything he can as a horror author on to his son and he describes the novel as a first-class piece of horror fiction ("top-notch piece of horror fiction"). Grossman describes the "real magic trick" behind the novel with the fact that Hill succeeds in portraying the main character at the beginning of the novel as a misanthropic and unsympathetic person and then in the course of the novel to inspire him more and more sympathy until the reader likes him and for him the horror of persecution and the shock of escalation becomes more receptive. With the novel, however, Grossman also puts the father-son relationship between the protagonist and his father as well as the spirit and his stepdaughter in a relationship with the father-son relationship of Joe Hill and Stephen King and describes the book as a “book about Fathers and Sons ”, in which Hill confronts his own spiritual and biological father. He writes: “It's about knowing your father, and finding him, and then killing him.” (“It's about knowing the father, finding him and then killing him.”)
In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin also establishes the direct relationship with Stephen King by certifying that it would be much easier to describe the book with one of King if he were not his actual father. In their opinion, surprisingly good effects have turned the book into a wild, hypnotizing, pervertedly funny story of horror. At the same time, she describes the work on Heart-Shaped Box as a balancing act between reality and fiction, in which the author manages to keep the story close to the action and realistic, without slipping too far into a dream world, and even in passages that are very are strongly shaped by violent visions and fantasies, through the intense visualization to hold the energy of the story. The book is anchored in the real world, in which the author builds up a serious empathy for the main character who has to face their nightmares and fight them. Geoff Nicholson , however, is less convinced , also a novelist, who published a review of the same book in the New York Times just a few days after Maslin . Above all, he criticizes clichés like the vehicles of the main characters and the ghost, which in his opinion certainly look very good in a film adaptation, as well as the characters, whose descriptions sometimes sound like casting notes. He also describes the backgrounds that are based on incest and child abuse as shallow and all too human, and in his opinion the plot loses all logic at the end.
The German newspaper Die Welt describes the novel as a bloody thriller and “homage to his father” and “product of the King's workshop”, placing the novel in relation to his early works: “From the whispering mysticism of the plot to the bloodlust of the finale, from left-wing patriotism, which stands between all the lines, to the sentiment-smeared happy ending - Papa would have done it all. "
The film rights were granted to Warner Bros. Entertainment in 2007. The film was supposed to be produced by Akiva Goldsman with a script by Neil Jordan , but has not yet been released.
Publications
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Heart-Shaped Box. William Morrow, New York 2007.
- German: Blind. Translation by Wolfgang Müller . Heyne, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-453-26546-2 .
supporting documents
- ↑ a b c d Janet Maslin: BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Clothes Make The Man Scared. In: The New York Times . February 8, 2007; Retrieved April 3, 2015.
- ↑ a b winners and nominees of the Bram Stoker Awards ; Joe Hill was nominated twice for Heart-Shaped Box at the 2008 Awards and won it in the First novel category .
- ↑ a b Winners and nominees ( Memento of the original from December 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. the Locus Awards ; Joe Hill won in the First novel category .
- ↑ a b Winners and nominees ( Memento of the original from September 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. the International Thriller Awards ; Joe Hill won in the First novel category .
- ^ A b The New York Times Best Sellers: Hardcover Fiction, April 8, 2007; Retrieved April 1, 2015.
- ^ A b c d Lev Grossman: The Son Also Frightens. Time, February 9, 2007; Retrieved April 1, 2015.
- ^ A b c Geoff Nicholson: What Not to Wear. In: The New York Times . February 11, 2007; Retrieved April 3, 2015.
- ↑ a b Joe Hill writes Splatter for Stephen King. The world . February 27, 2007; Retrieved April 3, 2015.
- ↑ a b Borys Kit (AP): Jordan will build 'Box' for Warners. The HollywoodReporter, March 4, 2007; Retrieved April 1, 2015.
