When Joe Hill was a boy, his family would sit in a circle and play pass-the-book, each member taking turns at reading passages aloud. Joe’s parents were both novelists (his father sometimes engaged the youngster in storytelling exercises), and he and his older brother Owen often played a sort of compositional tag based on variations of HP Lovecraft stories.
When I suggest that his upbringing sounds like a cross between The Waltons and The Addams Family, Hill emits a hearty chuckle.
“Naw, my dad’s not a scary guy,” he says. “My dad’s the most reassuring voice I know, he’s sort of the anti-fear guy. He’s a great one for stepping back from a situation and explaining why you shouldn’t be afraid. That’s not really the persona that comes through in his fiction, but he’s got this mantra, it’s been around forever: fear stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. The other acronym for fear is Fuck Everything And Run! But it’s partially true that writing is a great way to let go of the stuff you’re afraid of. If you pour it onto the page, you don’t have it in your head all the time.”
I should mention at this point that Joe’s full name is Joe Hillstrom King, that his mother Tabitha is the author of some seven novels, and his father Stephen is the most successful horror and fantasy writer of all time.
“Writing is a weird way to seek your living,” Joe says. “It didn’t seem real when I was growing up, but one of the reasons I fell into it was I’d come home from school and my mum’s a writer, I’d find her in her office tapping away, I’d find my dad in his office tapping away, it just seemed like making shit up was a perfectly rational way to make a living. So pretty much by the time I was 12 or 13 I’d come home and figure, ‘It’s time for me to write’.”
And write. At 34, Joe has just published his first full length novel Heart-Shaped Box, a best-seller with a bullet in the US, and a book whose success has afforded him a luxury only a handful of debutante novelists enjoy: an overseas tour.
“I go to three or four book stores a day, which is like sending a heroin addict to a head shop,” he laughs. “I was in Forbidden Planet, and there were people talking to me, a guy from the publishing company and a book seller, but I can’t hear them ’cos I’m looking at all the action figures and collections of pulp short stories.”
Joe decided to come clean about his genealogy only after he’d established himself with a limited edition short story collection entitled 20th Century Ghosts, published in October 2005 by the tiny British imprint PS Publishing after it was turned down by most of the major American publishing houses (according to the author, it’ll be reprinted by Gollancz in the autumn).
By the time people began to notice Joe’s marked physical resemblance to his father – the thick beard and piercing eyes didn’t help – 20th Century Ghosts had received the British Fantasy Award, The International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award for best collection, and his novella ‘Voluntary Committal’ was a World Fantasy Award winner last year.
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Peter Murphy 
