“There are guys kinda like Jude – Steve Tyler and Robert Plant come to mind – but those guys aren’t really angry, they’re rock ‘n’ roll survivors who seem to find a way to reinvent themselves every few years. Those guys don’t seem especially dark. If I was gonna find one word to describe them, I’d pick horny. The angry guys, the really deeply unhappy guys like Kurt Cobain and maybe Elliot Smith, tend to sort of self-immolate.”
The unwritten moral of Heart-Shaped Box is that if Jude had mainlined into his own creativity and found a way to grow old through his music instead of banging 22-year-olds and mooching around the house for five years, none of this stuff would have happened. The devil finds work for idle hands and all that.
“Yeah, when we first meet him, he’s a guy who’s literally looking to buy himself some trouble, and managed to get more than he expected. When I first started the book I thought it would be a short story called ‘Private Collection’, about 30 pages long, and that Jude would buy the ghost online and it would come to him and he would realise too late that he’d made a terrible mistake and he wouldn’t be able to save himself and would end up riding the night road with Craddock. But it didn’t work out that way, Jude refused to stick to the script.
“And part of the reason it didn’t work out was I didn’t want to let Jude go that easily, I got interested in who he was, why he’s morally adrift and is mean to the people who love him. He has this name, Judas Coyne, as soon as I came up with that I started thinking, ‘What a bullshit name’ – but I could see it as his stage name, and I became interested in who he was when he wasn’t Judas Coyne. And I felt the same way about his attitude, the bluster and anger and isolation, that it was a kind of disguise, the wall he threw up to protect himself. So I got curious about who he was, and that became a novel.”
Ultimately, a Trojan horse of a novel. Yes, Heart-Shaped Box is built around a schticky supernatural hook, but like any great horror or fantasy novel (Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes spring to mind) it functions as allegory for a lot of weighty ideas. In this case, physical pain, mortality, age, family, doubles and karmic payback. The book’s dual examination of demonic possession and the uncanny potency of music places it one door down the literary block from Pat McCabe’s Winterwood. (A week after we spoke, Warner Bros announced that McCabe’s frequent co-conspirator Neil Jordan will direct the film adaptation of Heart-Shaped Box.) It’s also another example of the merging of genre and mainstream fiction.
“I think that the tide has shifted a little bit in the last three or four years,” Joe says. “There’s been a sort of embrace of genre fiction in the literary world. There have been writers like Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, literary writers who are welcoming genre fiction back into the fold. And at the same time there have been some genre writers like Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman who have crossed the line and they’ve taken genre fiction to a wider audience and managed to pull in people who would normally turn their noses up at ghost stories.”
I read Gaiman’s Fragile Things over the winter and, like Hill’s novel and Brett Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, it gave me the same feeling I had as a teenager, reading for pure pleasure.
“Boy, that’s an amazing collection of short stories,” Hill says. “The thing that blew me away about Fragile Things is it’s one of the only collections I’ve read like a page turner. There was a story in there called ‘Bitter Grounds’ that I think I’ve thought about every day since I read it. It begins with this guy saying, ‘I was dead’, some key relationship in his life has been swept away from him, and he winds up driving to New Orleans to become a zombie. That was really, really unsettling and strange. I would love to have Neil Gaiman’s grace and light touch and his sense of humour. He’s sort of a magician.”
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Peter Murphy 
