Like another ’06 World Fantasy Award winner, George Saunders, Joe came back to speculative stories after years of labouring at the coalface of Carver-like realism.
“That’s exactly the way things worked out for me,” he says. “I wrote a lot of mainstream literary stories that I couldn’t sell to save my life, I just collected rejection after rejection, and eventually I sort of found my footing with this short story called ‘Pop Art’, which was in my first collection. ‘Pop Art’ was about the friendship between a hoodlum and an inflatable boy called Arthur Roth who’s made of plastic and is filled with air and weighs about six ounces, and if he sat on a thumb tack it’d kill him. I had a blast writing that story, it really took off for me, and I wound up selling it. After that I started thinking, ‘Maybe there’s something in weird tales for me.’
“I had also read an essay by Bernard Malamud called ‘Why Fantasy?’, and he talked about this idea that all literature is make-believe, and fantasy is as honest and valid as realism. That the invented worlds of Norman Mailer can seem more ‘real’ than the invented worlds of Lewis Carroll, but they’re not, they’re pure make-believe, and with that in mind a writer could introduce a fallen angel or a ghost or a talking animal and that was fair game. After reading that I thought, ‘Maybe I should just let my freak flag fly’. It still took a while, I had a lot to learn, but that was a big step.”
Over the next decade Joe honed his craft, inheriting his father’s storytelling gene and an innate understanding of how to ju-jitsu the reader’s phobic pressure points.
“Even though I’ve written ghost stories and stuff, I don’t really think I write from the stuff that scares me,” he considers. “I tend to write more from the stuff that gets me excited, the stuff that I love, like in Heart-Shaped Box, stuff about loud angry music, stuff I cared passionately about for years. And I think in my short stories too, the title story of the 20th Century Ghosts collection is about a guy who meets the woman who haunts a small town movie theatre, this girl who died during the The Wizard Of Oz, before the film was over, and she’s so pissed off about it she still haunts the theatre. Really that was a chance to write about something else I loved: old movie houses, the classic films of the ‘30s and ‘40s, so it’s got scary elements, but first and foremost I was interested in exploring a subject that excited me.
“I think there are things you can do which are almost like steroids for your imagination,” he continues. “One is you can read poetry, and another is you can read comic books, and they’re sort of exactly the same straight jolt, like a double espresso. The right poetry can have mixed concepts and language that fills you up with your own ideas to explore, and there’s something about a well-written comic book that can be so out of control and such a work of pure happy invention. And comic books don’t sit still, they have a huge sense of forward motion. You almost never read a good comic book that doesn’t have the pedal to the floor. And I love that.”
That’s certainly the pace of Heart-Shaped Box, which hits the ground running and then hares towards the denouement without skimping on atmosphere or characterisation. In a nutshell, it’s the tale of a soul-dead, womanising, semi-retired goth rock star by the name of Judas Coyne who, given to collecting ghoulish memorabilia, buys a ghost online. The ghost, it transpires, wants him dead.
Now I have to admit, I’m a fussy reader, but I couldn’t put Heart-Shaped Box down until it was good and done. I’m not easily spooked either, but the character of the southern-fried undead dowser and hypnotist Craddock creeped the hell out of me.
“I love it when you can find a story that chops your head off and you can just fall into it,” Joe laughs. “I’m glad you had that experience with Heart-Shaped Box.”
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Peter Murphy 
