Joe Hill, Horns

Joe Hill's Horns has a great first line: "Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things." And a great hook: when he wakes up the next morning Ig finds that he's grown horns. He's also somehow acquired other devilish attributes. Total strangers can't help but reveal their deepest urges to him once they see the horns, and a complete bio on the person, with a focus on their sins, is transmitted to Ig via the briefest touch. Compelling people to reveal themselves in this way turns out to be an inconvenient superpower to have, since the secrets people harbor are not always comfortable ones, and it's not necessarily a good thing to strip away the polite veneer of one's relationships. In Ig's case, there are some very unsettling truths to be uncovered. His girlfriend, Merrin, was raped and killed about a year earlier, and while there wasn't enough evidence to charge him for the crime, as far as public opinion goes, he's guilty as sin. People think some very bad things about Ig.

Horns follows Ig as he deals with his new attributes and collects unpleasant information, but it jumps around in time and perspective so that the full story of Ig and Merrin is fleshed out: their meeting as kids in church, their storybook romance and shared friendships, and what really happened the night Merrin died. Coming after the rush of the first section, when Ig is dealing with his horns in the present, the flashbacks are initially a disappointment, but one I got over: it turns out that Hill is telling a deeper story than I had originally expected.

What I particularly like about the book is that its absurd premise—that Ig is somehow morphing into Satan—plays itself out in an otherwise (for the most part) realistic world. If we accept the horns, the rest follows. The book's main weakness, to my mind, is where it deviates from this, when the horns are finally explained, sort of: I'm not sure that the explanation quite makes sense to me yet. The conclusion, too, seems over-long and ultimately a bit sappy. But apart from my disappointment with its conclusion, I loved this one.