Huuu

Synopsis Judas Coyne is a collector of the macabre: a cookbook for cannibals... a used hangman?s noose... a snuff film. An aging death-metal rock god, his taste for the unnatural is as widely known to his legions of fans as the notorious excesses of his youth. But nothing he possesses is as unlikely or as dreadful as his latest discovery, an item for sale on the Internet, a thing so terriblystrange, Jude can?t help but reach for his wallet. I will “sell” my stepfather?s ghost to the highest bidder...

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For a thousand dollars, Jude will become the proud owner of a dead man?s suit, said to be haunted by a restless spirit. He isn?t afraid. He has spent a lifetime coping with ghosts — of an abusive father, of the lovers he callously abandoned, of the bandmates he betrayed.What?s one more? But what UPS delivers to his door in a black heart-shaped box is no imaginary or metaphorical ghost, no benign conversation piece. It?s the real thing. And suddenly the suit?s previous owner is everywhere: behind the bedroom door... seated in Jude?s restored

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vintage Mustang... standing outside his window... staring out from his widescreen TV. Waiting — with a gleamingrazor blade on a chain dangling from one bony hand... Scanner?s note: I understand that Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King and this is his first novel. HEART-SHAPED BOX By JOE HILL Copyright © 2007 by Joe Hill. For my dad, one of the good ones HOW MAY THE DESTINATIONS? DEAD HAVE

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—Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire BLACK DOG

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Jude had a private collection. He had framed sketches of theSeven Dwarfs on the wall of his studio, in between his platinum records. John Wayne Gacy had drawn them while he was in jail and sent them to him. Gacy liked golden-age Disney almost as much as he liked molesting little kids; almost as much as he liked Jude?s albums. Jude had the skull of a peasant who had been trepanned in the sixteenth century, to let the demons out. He kept a collection ofpens jammed into the hole in the center of the cranium.

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He had a three-hundred-year-old confession, signed by a witch. “I did spake with a black dogge who sayd hee wouldst poison cows, drive horses mad and sicken children for me if I wouldst let him have my soule, and I sayd aye, and after did give him sucke at my breast.” She was burned to death. He had a stiff and worn noose that hadbeen used to hang a man in England at the turn of the nineteenth century, Aleister Crowley?s childhood chessboard, and a snuff film. Of all the items in Jude?s collection, this last was the thing he felt most uncomfortable about possessing. It had come to him by way of a police

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officer, a man who had worked security at some shows in L.A. The cop had said the video was diseased. Hesaid it with some enthusiasm. Jude had watched it and felt that he was right. It was diseased. It had also, in an indirect way, helped hasten the end of Jude?s marriage. Still he held on to it. Many of the objects in his private collection of the grotesque and the bizarre were gifts sent to him by his fans. It was rare for him to actually buy something for the collection himself. But when DannyWooten, his personal assistant, told him there was a ghost for sale on the Internet and asked did he want to buy it, Jude

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didn?t even need to think. It was like going out to eat, hearing the special, and deciding you wanted it without even looking at the menu. Some impulses required no consideration. Danny?s office occupied a relatively new addition, extending from the northeastern endof Jude?s rambling, 110-year-old farmhouse. With its climate control, OfficeMax furniture, and coffee-andcream industrial carpet, the office was coolly impersonal, nothing at all like the rest of the house. It might have been a dentist?s waiting room, if not for the concert posters in stainless-steel frames. One of them showed a jar

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crammed with staring eyeballs, bloody knots of...