Joe Hill: Heart-Shaped Box

“Come on, now, Jude. If you didn’t have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn’t be any fire left in your life at all,” she said. She stood on the other side of the kitchen counter, watching him with a certain wry, tender regard. “Anyway, you gave her a bus ticket to Buffalo, and…what? How much money?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Come on, now. You did something for her. You did plenty. What else were you supposed to do?”

Jude sat at the center island, holding the beer Marybeth had set in front of him but not drinking it. He was tired, still damp and chilly from the outside. A big truck, or a Greyhound maybe, roared down the highway, fled into the cold tunnel of the night, was gone. He could hear the puppies out in their pen, yipping at it, excited by its noise.

“I hope she makes it,” Jude said.

“To Buffalo? I don’t see why she wouldn’t,” Marybeth said.

“Yeah,” Jude said, although he wasn’t sure that was what he’d really meant at all.

HEART-SHAPED ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Raise your lighters for one last schmaltzy power ballad and allow me to sing the praises of those folks who gave so much to help bring Heart-Shaped Box into existence. My thanks to my agent, Michael Choate, who steers my professional ship with care, discretion, and uncommon good sense. I owe much to Jennifer Brehl, for all the hard work she put into editing my novel, for guiding me through the final draft, and especially for taking a chance on Heart-Shaped Box in the first place. Maureen Sugden did an extraordinary job of copyediting my novel. Thanks are also due to Lisa Gallagher, Juliette Shapland, Kate Nintzel, Ana Maria Allessi, Lynn Grady, Rich Aquan, Lorie Young, Kim Lewis, Seale Ballenger, Kevin Callahan, Sara Bogush, and everyone else at William Morrow who went to bat for the book. Gratitude is owed, as well, to Jo Fletcher, at Gollancz, in England, who sweated over this book as much as anyone.

My deepest appreciation to Andy and Kerri, for their enthusiasm and friendship, and to Shane, who is not only my compadre but who also keeps my web site, joehillfiction.com, flying with spit and imagination. And I can’t say how grateful I am to my parents and siblings for their time, thoughts, support, and love.

Most of all, my love and thanks to Leanora and the boys. Leanora spent I don’t know how many hours reading and rereading this manuscript, in all its various forms, and talking with me about Jude, Marybeth, and the ghosts. To put it another way: She read a million pages, and she rocked them all. Thanks, Leanora. I am so glad and so lucky to have you as my best friend.

That’s all, and thanks for coming to my show, everyone. Good night, Shreveport!

Throw Up Your Horns:

Thoughts on the Second Novel

The first concert I went to was KISS, Madison Square Garden, the original members in their glam makeup, Gene Simmons vomiting blood and breathing flame. I was psyched. I had the Colorforms set, the comics, Double Platinum on vinyl. I knew all their secrets. I knew their true names: Demon and Catman, Spaceman and Starchild, names that suited them far better than Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter. I knew that KISS stood for KNIGHTS IN SATAN’S SERVICE, even if the band said it didn’t (wink wink). I was a card-carrying member of the KISS Army. I was eight years old and when the band hit the stage, leaping through a curtain of white fire, I screamed my head off and threw my horns in the air. You know about throwing the horns: make a fist, then stick up your index finger and your pinkie, to show your enthusiasm for personal damnation and the devil. At my age I probably didn’t know that was what it meant; I just knew it felt right.

People tend to overrate the importance of their firsts: concert, kiss, friend, lay, car, broken promise, broken heart. We aren’t ducklings, doomed to imprint on the first moving creature we see, and think of it as mother for the rest of our lives. Yeah, KISS made the first music that ever connected with me, but thirty years after that initial infatuation, it’s my sense that their genius lay in their marketing, not their music. (‘Course, Judas Coyne would’ve been glad to go on tour with them. Jude’s Hammer and KISS on the same bill? Money in the bank, baby.)

I’ve moved on. Borrow my iPod for an hour, put my music on shuffle, you might come across Josh Ritter or Weezer, but you won’t be hearing “Lick it Up.”

But if early influences are overrated, it’s still probably true that what charged your batteries as a kid will often provide clues to what will charge them later. The excitement I felt when I heard “Heaven’s On Fire” for the first time was a shock of discovery, of having come across a secret door, one that opened into a whole series of connected rooms. Dark rooms, with different music playing in each one. And not just any music. Loud music: AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Nine-Inch Nails.

And while I may have outgrown KISS’s sound, I remain preoccupied with certain dizzying notions first suggested to me by that gang of good-Jewish-boys-gone-glam from New York City. Such as: The power of casting aside your old name and taking on a new, more honest one; the thrill of breathing fire, either metaphorically, or actually; the possibility of an ordinary man transforming himself into something bigger-than-life, something both monstrous and wonderful, in the way Chaim Witz only needed to daub on some face makeup to become a demon with a guitar. Jesus saves, but the devil rock-and-rolls all night long (and parties every day). And while, as a child, I could not understand the erotic link the band made between burning heaven and getting laid—between destruction and sexual release—I wasn’t deaf either. It made its impression.

I wrote about some of these things in Heart-Shaped Box , and then that novel was done, and I didn’t know what to do next. I picked at this, I made a mess of that. It wasn’t a great time. I think now that most writers who struggle are really wrestling not with their work, but with their identities. They’d like to write someone else’s novels—Michael Chabon’s maybe, or Neil Gaiman’s. Because maybe they felt they gave too much of themselves away in the last book, and they’re scared to do it again. Maybe the version of themselves they revealed wore devil makeup and spat blood and they don’t want to be that person; they want to wipe the makeup off, be taken seriously.

Remember what happened when the guys in KISS started performing without greasepaint and dropped the freaky names? All the magic was gone. They ran from what made them . . . them . They weren’t KISS anymore, they were just four hard-rock musicians, technically capable, of course, but oddly flavorless. All the craft in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you won’t let your freak flag fly and write your enthusiasms, excitements, secret turn-ons, wishes, hates, and hopes. It is my suggestion that when KISS wiped off the makeup they were not showing their true faces to the world, but erasing them. The mask was more exciting (because it was more honest) than what lay beneath it.

I mention all this to make a point, that the artist’s primary creation is not their work, but the sensibility that creates the work. You want to write (or paint, or direct, or dance) from your truest self, and that means knowing what belongs to you—your particular subjects, motifs, characters, and rhythms. Eventually I found my way back to what belonged to me, and Horns was the natural byproduct: a story about transformation, fire, spitting blood, music, regret, and redemption not from sin, but through it. It goes to a different place than Heart-Shaped Box , but anyone can see the same guy with the same interests (obsessions) wrote it. I don’t know what it means, that I have to write about those things; I just know it feels right.