I think it was Plato who said that men and women started out as one being but then Zeus got jealous and split them apart so that they will spend the rest of their lives looking for their other half. At the heart of Joe Hill’s new book, Horns, is a story about a man who discovers that without his one true love, he is lost. He could devolve into the darkest part of himself and become a real demon. It’s only April so it might be a little premature to say this, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that HORNS is probably one of the best books I’ve read this year. I was riveted by it. I was in turns fascinated, horrified, repulsed, awed, and at a couple of points throughout the book, I had to look away from the pages because I was choked up and furiously blinking back tears. For a story about a guy sporting actual horns from his temple, it’s dark, funny, romantic, scary, and best all, real. I am totally in love with Joe Hill’s work. I’ve read everything he’s ever written, even the short stories and the comics. When I see an anthology featuring Joe Hill, I snatch it up (in the zombie antho The New Dead, there’s one that features an old-timey circus, Twitter, and of course, zombies). As much as I loved Heart-Shaped Box, I gotta say that HORNS is better.

Our hero Ig Perrish, the son of a Leonard Cohen-type legend and a showgirl, is an all-around good guy. He’s not as handsome or as talented as his older brother Terry, the host of a late-night show and a musician, but he is happy with his lot in life. His girlfriend, Merrin, is beautiful, kind, and going to school to become a doctor and they have been in love with each other since they were fifteen years old. For as long as Ig could remember, his heart has always belonged to Merrin and he has never wanted anyone else. The two of them meet at church when Ig notices a pretty redhead playing with her cross necklace so that it catches light and flashing it at Ig in what appears to be Morse code. Ig is convinced that he and Merrin are going to get married, have children, live happily ever after, and die in each other’s arms in their sleep. And then one day, Merrin, universally loved by man and critters, is brutally raped, murdered, and everyone in town believes that Ig did it, even his own friends and parents. All of a sudden, everything in Ig’s life starts to go wrong. He drops out of college, starts drinking heavily, shacks up with his high school’s skank, refuses to get a job, and spends every waking moment obsessing about his dead girlfriend. It gets even worse when he wakes up with a bitching headache, puts his hand up to his temples, and finds protrusions from his skull. He looks in the mirror and yep, horns.

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I was looking through the boxes of books that I hadn’t seen in years—I’m like Claudia Kishi from the Babysitter’s Club, only it’s books instead of junk food stashed in all sorts of hiding places—and came across a glutton’s trove of vintage Harlequin Presents. To a book junkie, this is like stumbling across a giant mound of cocaine and a naked Brandon Routh sprawled over a bear rug offering his washboard abs from which you could snort it with a diamond-encrusted platinum straw. Unless the book was dirty. And not just dusty. This particular book had spaghetti sauce stains on some of the pages—I may have bought this batch from the yard sale of a harangued mother with five children or Goodwill, I don’t know—and the name Elisa Harper scribbled on the back of the front page under This Book Belongs To. This book had a life before me! I hope whatever germs and other yucky things that have been living between the pages have died over the years from being in a box for so long. Damn it, that’s the problem with old books and library books. People don’t always wash their goddamned hands. And this one was published in 1980! Maybe Elisa Harper bought it from the swapmeet or AMVETS. Maybe it had four or five or six owners before me! I don’t really mind buying books from a used book store or a thrift shop, but I’ve never really thought about the other people who’ve touched the thing before I did. What if they were compulsive nose—nay, buttpickers? Gross.

OmgIhavetofindabottleofPurellrightnow. I feel so itchy now!

Enough of my neuroses, here’s the blurb.

She hadn’t even known his name…

As an inexperienced drama student, Clare had been shocked and disgusted by the sudden and rough lovemaking of Luke, an older, handsome stranger. She had turned away from love—for good.

Now, nine years later, Clare was a famous actress. She valued her friendship to Macey Janson, a leading playwright and producer, because Macey was willing to leave it at that—just friends.

But when chance suddenly thrust Luke back into Clare’s life, she faced a strange situation that was a threat to all her relationships.

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When we last saw the Dollagangers, they were escaping the attic in which they were locked up for almost four years, plotting revenge against their evil mother, and incest-kissing like it’s going out of style (has it ever ever been in style? No, it has never been in style). With their little sister Carrie in tow, Cathy and Chris lug their belongings into a bus to head down to Florida where they can have a new start and make their living as flying trapeze artists. Due to the heat, exhaustion, hunger, and all around weakness (not to mention the arsenic poisoning — spoiler!), the little tow-headed albatross starts throwing up. Cathy and Chris mop up the vomit with some napkins and are told they will be thrown off the bus by the driver when he catches them trying to stick the dirty napkins in between the seats (the disgusting pigs). Luckily, there is a magical and mute old obese black lady in there with them who sees the suffering child and offers to take them to the doctor with her (she carries a notepad around her neck with which she conveys her thoughts). At the next stop, the Dollagangers get off the bus with the old black lady who takes them to a perfect cookie-cutter house where she is the caretaker and housekeeper for a man she calls “doctor-son.” The doctor-son is a debonair, handsome, extremely kind, and lonely man called Dr. Paul Sheffield. If a man who is a complete stranger living in the middle of nowhere offered you and your siblings to live in his mansion-cottage in a lap of luxury, would you take it?

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I’ve never been a particularly religious person. Growing up a Catholic Filipino-American, my exposure to church was my mother dragging me out of bed at the crack of why-am-I-awake on a Sunday, making me put on a skirt, and forcing me to sit on a pew for a whole hour listening to some guy in a dress tell me that it’s not too late, that I don’t have to go to hell, if I just say sorry, my bad, and stop sneaking money out of my mother’s purse. And blaming things on my sister. This routine got old for a while, even for my long-suffering mother, so when I was about seventeen, I woke up to an empty house on a Sunday morning. The car was not in the driveway, my parents and sisters weren’t home, and there was a plate on the kitchen counter with a solitary egg, two pieces of bacon, one dry toast, and a note that said, “Bam” (unrecognizable emoticon. Not happy, not sad. Straight line for a mouth). We never discussed why my mother stopped dragging me to church. Maybe she got tired of shushing me during mass while I made fun of the priest’s Filipino accent to the delight of my equally bored sisters. Maybe I made her feel like a bad person for threatening to kill me if I didn’t shut my mouth for one hour, just one hour, for God’s sake.

So I must not have been in church on the day that they talked about stigmata. I had not heard of it until I saw that awesome-awful movie starring Patricia Arquette. Is there something I’m not understanding about this idea of receiving the wounds of Christ (punctures through the palms and feet, bleeding forehead, a stab through the side, not to mention the wicked-weird visions and God talking to you) and suffering not just pain but people thinking you’re hurting yourself for attention, just because YOU REALLY LOVE the LORD AND THIS IS YOUR REWARD?!? And why would anyone inflict this thing on a 7-year-old Jewish girl whose parents are in the middle of a really bad, really ugly divorce?

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Once upon a time, in a mansion deep in the heart of the South, a beautiful blond princess borne to a heartless, cold woman and a cold, soulless man, fell illicitly in love with a beautiful blond prince. This beautiful blond prince happens to be the very much younger half-brother of her father, which makes him a dirty uncle, though not quite so dirty, and yet dirty all the same. The parents of the princess who are very religious people are not so happy with this. They disinherit the princess and the uncle and throw them out of the mansion. The princess and the uncle, shamed and utterly humiliated, flee in the dead of night, never to be heard from in polite society ever again.

But fate is seemingly kind to pretty, blond people and the princess called Corinne and the dirty uncle called Christopher, change their last name to Dollaganger, manage to build a happy little life together, in love and utterly ensnared with each other’s remarkable golden blond looks. Genetics be damned, the two pretty pretty people make love like pretty pretty blond monkeys and produce two perfectly beautiful blond and blue eyed children with two arms, two legs, and are luckily intelligent and talented in their own special way. The blond girl-child is named Cathy and the blond boy-child is named Christopher, after their father. The two children are so utterly perfect and doll-like that they are nicknamed the Dresden Dolls. The girl-child is beloved by the father and shows signs of growing up to be one of those creatures seeking a man to marry who will love her the way Daddy had loved her. The boy-child is favored by the mommy. The mother Corrine, unsatisfied with her current lot and practically mocking fate to give her mutant deformed babies, gets pregnant again and has two more perfectly golden blond babies, fraternal twins called Cory and Carrie. Cathy pouts when she discovers she will no longer be the baby of the family and solicits a promise from her daddy that he will not love the new girl-child more than he loves her and as a testament to that promise, Daddy puts on a heart-shaped garnet ring on Cathy’s tiny doll-like finger.

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