by Joe Hill
Nowadays I admit I find Bradbury’s sentences to be a bit cloying (not every line has to be a clown on a unicycle juggling torches). But at fourteen I needed someone to show me the explosive power of a well-crafted and imaginative phrase. After Zen in the Art of Writing, I read nothing but Bradbury for a while: Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, and, best of all, Something Wicked This Way Comes. How I loved Dark’s carnival of sick, reality-deforming rides, especially that awful carousel at the center, a merry-go-round that spun children into old men. Then there were Bradbury’s short stories—everyone knows those short stories—masterpieces of weird fiction that can be read in as few as ten minutes and then never forgotten. There was “A Sound of Thunder,” the story of some hunters who pay dearly for the chance to shoot dinosaurs. Or what about “The Fog Horn,” Bradbury’s tale of a prehistoric creature that falls in love with a lighthouse? His creations were ingenious and dazzling and effortless, and I turned to Zen in the Art of Writing over and over to figure out how he did it. And indeed, he had some sturdy, practical tools to offer the student writer. There was one exercise that involved making lists of nouns to generate story ideas. I still use a variation of it to this day (I reworked it into a game of my own called “Elevator Pitch”).
My father got me a book by Lawrence Block called Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which collected Block’s how-to columns for Writer’s Digest. I have it still. I dropped my copy into the bath, so it’s now swollen and deformed, and the ink is blurred where I underlined long passages, but to me it’s as valuable as a signed first edition by Faulkner. What I took from Block was that writing is a trade, like other trades, like carpentry. To demystify the art, he focused in on minutiae, like: What’s a great first sentence? How much detail is too much? Why do some shock endings work while others, frankly, suck donkey nuts?
And—I found this especially fascinating—what are the benefits of writing under a pseudonym?
Block was no stranger to pseudonyms. He had a basket of them, had used them to create particular identities for particular works of fiction. Bernard Malamud once observed that a writer’s first and most challenging creation is himself; once you’ve invented yourself, the stories will flow naturally from your persona. I got a charge out of the idea that Block would, when it suited him, throw on a new face and write novels by people who were themselves fictions.
“Oh, yeah,” my dad said. “Check out Such Men Are Dangerous, the novel Block wrote as Paul Kavanagh. That book is less like a novel, more like getting mugged in an alley.” Such Men Are Dangerous was the story of an ex-soldier who had done ugly things in the war and come home looking to do some ugly things right here. While it has been decades since I read it, I think my dad’s assessment was roughly correct. Bradbury’s sentences were firecrackers on a summer night. Kavanagh’s were blows from a lead pipe. Larry Block seemed like a real nice guy. Paul Kavanagh didn’t.
Around that time I started to wonder who I’d be if I weren’t me anymore.
I WROTE THREE OTHER NOVELS in my high-school years. They shared one common artistic thread: They all sucked. Even then, though, I understood that this was normal. Prodigies are almost always tragic figures, who blaze hot for a couple of years and are reduced to cinders by the time they’re twenty. Everyone else has to do it the slow way, the hard way, one dull shovel-load of dirt at a time. That slow, hard work rewards a person by building up the mental and emotional muscles, and possibly establishing a firmer foundation on which to build a career. Then, when setbacks come, you’re ready for them. After all, you’ve faced them before.
In college, naturally enough, I began to think about trying to get some of my stories published. I was afraid, though, to submit work under my own name. So far, I knew, I had not written anything worth reading. How would I know when I’d written something good, really good? I worried I might send out a crummy book and someone would publish it anyway, because they saw a chance to make a quick buck on the last name. I was insecure, often gripped by peculiar (and unrealistic) anxieties, and I needed to know, for myself, that when I sold a story, it sold for the right reasons.
So I dropped my last name and began writing as Joe Hill. Why Hill? It was an abbreviated form of my middle name, Hillström—and in retrospect, oh, man, what was I thinking, right? The umlaut is the hardest-rocking unit of punctuation in the English language, and I have one in my name, and I didn’t use it. My one chance to be metal, and I blew it.
I also thought I’d better avoid writing scary stories, that I should try to find my own material. So I wrote a mess of New Yorker–style tales about divorce, raising difficult children, and midlife anxiety. These stories had some good lines here and there and not much else to recommend them. I didn’t have much to say about divorce—I’d never been married! Same for raising difficult kids. The only experience I had with difficult kids was being one. And since I was in my mid-twenties, I was spectacularly unqualified to write about midlife breakdowns.
Aside from all that, the real challenge of trying to write a good New Yorker story was that I didn’t like New Yorker stories. In my free time, I was reading fucked-up horror comics by Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, not tales of middle-class ennui by Updike and Cheever.
At some point, probably about two hundred rejections in, I had a minor revelation. It was true that if I was out there writing as Joseph King, it would be awkward to start banging out horror stories. It would look like I was grabbing at my dad’s coattails with both fists. But Joe Hill was just another Joe Schmo. No one knew anything about Hill’s father and mother. He could be whatever kind of artist he wanted to be—and what he wanted to be was Tom Savini, on the page.
You get the life you’re dealt, and if you’re going to write, that’s your ink. It’s the only ink you get. Mine was just very red.
When I gave myself permission to start writing weird tales of the supernatural, all my problems vanished almost overnight, and before you could say New York Times bestseller, I was—hahahahahaha, just kidding. I still had piles and piles of shit to write. I churned out another four novels that never went anywhere. There was Paper Angels, a third-rate Cormac McCarthy pastiche. There was a young adult fantasy novel, The Evil Kites of Dr. Lourdes (no, fuck YOU, that’s a great title). There was The Briars, a confused, unsuccessful effort to write a John D. MacDonald–style thriller about two teenagers on a summer kill spree. The best of them was a J. R. R. Tolkien thing called The Fear Tree, which I spent three years on and which became an international bestseller in my wet dreams. In real life it was rejected by every publisher in New York and shanked by every publisher in London. For a final kick in the nuts, it was turned down flat by every publisher in Canada, which is a reminder to us all: No matter how low you go, you can always fall lower still.
(I don’t mean it, Canada.)
While I was churning out my train-wreck novels, I was also writing short stories, and over those months (and years—yikes!) of writing, good things began to happen. A story about the friendship between a juvenile delinquent and an inflatable boy wound up in a well-regarded anthology of Jewish magical realism, even though I was a goy (the editor didn’t mind). A tale about a ghost haunting a small-town movie theater landed in the High Plains Literary Review. That doesn’t mean much to most people, but for me, getting into the High Plains Literary Review (distribution approximately a thousand copies) was like peeling open a chocolate bar and discovering a golden ticket. Some other good shorts followed. I wrote one about a lonely teenage boy who goes Kafka and turns into a giant locust—only to find he prefers it to being human. There was another about a disconnected antique phone that sometimes rang with calls from the dead. Another about the troubled sons of Abraham Van Helsing. And so on. I won a couple of minor literary prizes and landed in a best-of collection. A talent scout at Marvel Comics read one of my stories and gave me the chance to write my own eleven-page Spider-Man story.
It wasn’t much, but you know what they say: Enough is as good as a feast. At some point in 2004, not l
ong after it became clear that The Fear Tree was going nowhere, I accepted that I didn’t have it in me to be a novelist. I had done my best, taken my shot, and washed out. It was okay. More than okay. I had written for Spider-Man, and if I never figured out how to write a good novel, I had at least learned I had it in me to compose a satisfying short story. I wasn’t ever going to measure up to my dad, but then I kind of figured that going in. And just because I didn’t have a novel in me, that didn’t mean I couldn’t find myself a job in the world of comic books. Some of my favorite stories were comic books.
I did have enough short pieces for a collection, about a dozen, and decided to put it out there and see if anyone wanted to take a chance on it. I wasn’t surprised when it was passed over by bigger publishers, who still prefer novels to collections for sound commercial reasons. I thought I would try the small-press world and in December 2004 got a callback from Peter Crowther, the distinguished gentleman behind PS Publishing, a very small imprint in the east of England. Peter wrote weird tales himself and had been taken with my story “Pop Art,” the one about the inflatable boy. He offered to do a small print run of the book, 20th Century Ghosts, casually doing me a kindness I can’t ever repay. But then Pete—and some of the other guys in the small-press world, like Richard Chizmar and Bill Schafer—have done such kindnesses for lots of writers, publishing stuff not because they thought it would make them rich but because they loved it. (Ahem, this is your cue to visit the Web sites for PS Publishing, Cemetery Dance Publications, and Subterranean Press and do your bit to support an up-and-comer by picking up one of their publications. Go ahead, it’ll be good for your bookshelf.)
Pete asked me to write some more short stories for the book, so there’d be some “exclusive,” never-published fiction in there. I said okay and started one about a guy who buys a ghost on the Internet. Somehow it got away from me, and 335 pages later I discovered I had a novel in me after all. I titled it Heart-Shaped Box.
Boy, it reads like a Stephen King novel. To be fair, I came by it honestly.
I WAS ALWAYS A LATE BLOOMER, and that first book, 20th Century Ghosts, came out when I was thirty-three. I’m forty-six now, and will be forty-seven by the time this book is out. The days blast past you at full throttle, man, and leave you breathless.
I had a fear when I started out that people would know I was Stephen King’s son, so I put on a mask and pretended I was someone else. But the stories always told the truth, the true truth. I think good stories always do. The stories I’ve written are all the inevitable product of their creative DNA: Bradbury and Block, Savini and Spielberg, Romero and Fango, Stan Lee and C. S. Lewis, and most of all, Tabitha and Stephen King.
The unhappy creator finds himself in the shadow of other, bigger artists and resents it. But if you’re lucky—and as I’ve already said, I’ve had more than my fair share of luck, and please God, let it hold—those other, bigger artists cast a light for you to find your way.
And who knows? Maybe one day you even have the good fortune to work right alongside one of your heroes. I had a chance to write a couple of stories with my father and went for it. It was fun. I hope you like ’em—they’re here in this book.
I had some years to wear a mask, but I breathe better now that it’s off my face.
And that’s enough from me for a while. We’ve got some riding to do. Come on. Let’s go.
Bring on the bad guys.
Joe Hill
Exeter, New Hampshire
September 2018
Throttle
with Stephen King
THEY RODE WEST FROM THE SLAUGHTER, through the painted desert, and did not stop until they were a hundred miles away. Finally, in the early afternoon, they turned in at a diner with a white stucco exterior and pumps on concrete islands out front. The overlapping thunder of their engines shook the plate-glass windows as they rolled by. They drew up together among parked long-haul trucks, on the west side of the building, and there they put down their kickstands and turned off their bikes.
Race Adamson had led them the whole way, his Harley running sometimes as much as a quarter mile ahead of anyone else’s. It had been Race’s habit to ride out in front ever since he’d returned to them, after two years in the sand. He ran so far in front it often seemed he was daring the rest of them to try and keep up, or maybe he had a mind to simply leave them behind. He hadn’t wanted to stop here, but Vince had forced him to. As the diner came into sight, Vince had throttled after Race, blown past him, and then shot his hand left in a gesture the Tribe knew well: Follow me off the highway. The Tribe let Vince’s hand gesture call it, as they always did. Another thing for Race to dislike about him, probably. The kid had a pocketful of them.
Race was one of the first to park but the last to dismount. He stood astride his bike, slowly stripping off his leather riding gloves, glaring at the others from behind his mirrored sunglasses.
“You ought to have a talk with your boy,” Lemmy Chapman said to Vince. Lemmy nodded in Race’s direction.
“Not here,” Vince said. It could wait until they were back in Vegas. He wanted to put the road behind him. He wanted to lie down in the dark for a while, wanted some time to allow the sick knot in his stomach to abate. Maybe most of all, he wanted to shower. He hadn’t gotten any blood on him but felt contaminated all the same and wouldn’t be at ease in his own skin until he’d washed off the morning’s stink.
He took a step in the direction of the diner, but Lemmy caught his arm before he could go any farther. “Yes. Here.”
Vince looked at the hand on his arm—Lemmy didn’t let go; Lemmy of all the men had no fear of him—then glanced toward the kid, who wasn’t really a kid at all anymore and hadn’t been for years. Race was opening the hardcase over his back tire, fishing through his gear for something.
“What’s to talk about? Clarke’s gone. So’s the money. There’s nothing left to do.”
“You ought to find out if Race feels the same way. You been assuming the two of you are on the same page, even though these days he spends forty minutes of every hour pissed off at you. Tell you something else, boss. Race brought some of these guys in, and he got a lot of them fired up, talking about how rich they were all going to get on his deal with Clarke. He might not be the only one who needs to hear what’s next.” He glanced meaningfully at the other men. Vince noticed for the first time that they weren’t drifting on toward the diner but hanging around by their bikes, casting looks toward him and Race both. Waiting for something to come to pass.
Vince didn’t want to talk. The thought of talk drained him. Lately conversation with Race was like throwing a medicine ball back and forth, a lot of wearying effort, and he didn’t feel up to it, not with what they were driving away from.
He went anyway, because Lemmy was almost always right when it came to Tribe preservation. Lemmy had been riding six to Vince’s twelve going back to when they’d met in the Mekong Delta and the whole world was dinky dau. They had been on the lookout for trip wires and buried mines then. Nothing much had changed in the almost forty years since.
Vince left his bike and crossed to Race, who stood between his Harley and a parked truck, an oil hauler. Race had found what he was hunting for in the hardcase on the back of his bike, a flask sloshing with what looked like tea and wasn’t. He drank earlier and earlier, something else Vince didn’t like. Race had a pull, wiped his mouth, held it out to Vince. Vince shook his head.
“Tell me,” Vince said.
“If we pick up Route 6,” Race said, “we could be down in Show Low in three hours. Assuming that pussy rice-burner of yours can keep up.”
“What’s in Show Low?”
“Clarke’s sister.”
“Why would we want to see her?”
“For the money. Case you hadn’t noticed, we just got fucked out of sixty grand.”
“And you think his sister will have it.”
“Place to start.”
“Let’s talk about it back in Vegas. Look
at our options there.”
“How about we look at ’em now? You see Clarke hanging up the phone when we walked in? I heard a snatch of what he was saying through the door. I think he tried to get his sister, and when he didn’t, he left a message with someone who knows her. Now, why do you think he felt a pressing need to reach out and touch that toe-rag as soon as he saw all of us in the driveway?”
To say his good-byes, was Vince’s theory, but he didn’t tell Race that. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this, does she? What’s she do? She make crank, too?”
“No. She’s a whore.”
“Jesus. What a family.”
“Look who’s talking,” Race said.
“What’s that mean?” Vince asked. It wasn’t the line that bothered him, with its implied insult, so much as Race’s mirrored sunglasses, which showed a reflection of Vince himself, sunburned and with a beard full gray, looking puckered, lined, and old.
Race stared down the shimmering road again, and when he spoke, he didn’t answer the question. “Sixty grand up in smoke, and you can just shrug it off.”
“I didn’t shrug anything off. That’s what happened. Up in smoke.”
Race and Dean Clarke had met in Fallujah—or maybe it had been Tikrit. Clarke a medic specializing in pain management, his treatment of choice being primo dope accompanied by generous helpings of Wyclef Jean. Race’s specialties had been driving Humvees and not getting shot. The two of them had remained friends back in the World, and Clarke had come to Race a half a year ago with the idea of setting up a meth lab in Smith Lake. He figured sixty grand would get him started and that he’d be making more than that per month in no time.
