There are things I consider absolutely criminal: eating pizza out of a bowl, littering, and the dissolution of the horror section in big-box book stores. It’s hard to be a horror fan sometimes; now our potential favorites are scattered to the winds of the general fiction section, and unless they’re huge names like Stephen King, they fall to the wayside.
Luckily for Joe Hill, he’s Stephen King’s son. He wasn’t always known that way; for years he struggled along as an aspiring novelist, and once he made it big, the cat kind of slipped out of the bag. While he’s not as huge as his father — he’s not going to pop up on all of the ”books you must read before you die” lists just yet — he should. He probably will soon. He’s a master of the spooky, and he’s on the cusp of becoming a household name.
Like Father, Like Son
If Stephen King is the king of horror, Hill is his heir apparent. The King family has produced a cadre of writers, from wife Tabitha to sons Owen and Joe. And while books like Stephen and Owen King’s Sleeping Beauties prove the family isn’t opposed to collaboration, Hill’s relationship with his father’s body of work is a little different.
Any fan of The Dark Tower series will tell you how the worlds of King’s books are all connected. They’ll tell you all about the connection in the same way a conspiracy theorist will tell you about the JFK assassination: with charts, graphs, and way more words than are necessary or even socially acceptable.
It’s true, though. For years, King has been entertaining us with spooky stories, that, at the heart of them, are all connected. He doesn’t have a body of work; he has a whole universe that is filled with all the things that go bump in the night. Or in interdimensional spaces. Every horror he adds into his books takes its place among a pantheon of monsters connected by The Dark Tower. How is this important to Hill? Easy: His books are connected, too.
In the novel NOS4A2, Hill terrorizes small children with a man named Charlie Manx who abducts kids and takes them to a nightmarish other world that is a twisted Christmastland. Our plucky young hero, as she fights Manx, ventures through Christmastland and discovers a map of special “other” places. On the map is the treehouse from Hill’s novel Horns, and a handful of other very familiar places to King’s readers: Pennywise’s circus and Derry, Maine. Mid-World, and Shawshank Prison rank a reference by the bad guy, as well as the villains from Doctor Sleep, the True Knot.
The connection is two-sided. In Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining, an adult Danny Torrence hears a story about a boogey man named Charlie Manx.
While this might be the two novelists having a little fun, or maybe Hill is just remembering the face of his father, King’s connected worlds is a fairly big deal among fans (who hunt for Easter eggs in the ka-tet’s books with vigor). We don’t know if Hill has a plan for his connected works, but we do know that, like his father, his film and TV presence is experiencing something of a renaissance.
Adaptations
Hill fans can look to Netflix to bring to life two of his projects; In the Tall Grass, a novella co-authored with King, and Locke & Key. Locke & Key is one of Hill’s first successful works, long before anyone knew who is father was. It is a Lovecraftian tale of horror that focuses on the Locke family as they interact with a series of interdimensional doors that hold back a collective of demons and assorted monsters. While the series is in pre-production, there is one person who has already been cast: Bode Locke, who will be played by Jackson Robert Scott. Scott is best known as poor Georgie Denborough from 2017’s IT.
NOS4A2 is also headed to your TV, this time via AMC. Following their strong tradition of horror, AMC has ordered a ten episode series that is set to air in 2019.
Joe Hill and True Crime
And if all of that weren’t enough, Hill is bringing new life to a very old murder mystery. In the summer of 1974, Hill explains, two things of note happened around Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard. One, the movie Jaws was filmed at the Vineyard. Two, a woman was murdered outside Cape Cod. Her murder has never been solved, and she has never been identified. She is known only as the Lady of the Dunes.
She was somewhere between 20 and 30 years old. She wore a blue bandana. Her hands were missing. Her head was nearly severed. And according to to Hill, it’s very possible that before whatever terrible thing happened to her, she was an extra on the set of Jaws.
Hill reminds us that he is the very example of a biased person: He is a horror novelist with an active imagination who looks for the unthinkable in everything. His father wrote on The Lady of the Dunes in Skeleton Crew, so she is ever present in his mind. Jaws is his favorite film. When you put these three things together, he acknowledges he sounds like a crackpot. But still … there is a woman in the movie who very closely matches the police rendering of what The Lady looks like.
It makes for a tantalizingly good story, doesn’t it? In the movie, a shark hunts the waters for victims. In filming, a monster hunted among the people. And who knows? He might be onto something. Maybe sometime in the very near future, crowdsourced crime detection means an old criminal will be trying to figure out a good defense for murder of the severed body part variety.
Bottom line: Go buy his books. Turn off your phone and grab some snacks. You’ll be grateful.