Horns by Joe Hill

Horns has a really interesting premise, and when I started reading it, I was thinking that this was going to be a great novel. Unfortunately, the novel came up short in its execution, and left me disappointed. The premise, as I mentioned, is a really neat one. Ig Perrish is suffering in the aftermath of the brutal rape and murder of his girlfriend, Merrin. Although never arrested, he remains the prime suspect of her murder. Even his parents don’t believe him. On the one year anniversary of Merrin’s death, he develops horns on his head. He also has some super powers. People feel compelled to tell him and act upon their worst hidden secrets. He can also do things like influence the behavior of people and perfectly mimic voices.



There were two big things that make this novel unravel. The first is that every person that Ig comes across is a horrible nasty person with terrible hidden desires. Call me an optimist, but I don’t believe must people are awful, despicable people. The only person who is half way redeemable is Ig’s brother, Terry, but even he has a seriously wicked deed in his past. These types of characters and repeals got repetitive and dull after a while. The other thing is that there were so many long captions of flashbacks that it sucked any kind of momentum out of the story. I think flashback can be effective in limited doses, but this novel has like fifty pages at a time of flashback and it just killed the reading of the story. I also felt at times that Hill fell in love with his own prose and got away from trying to tell a good story. I’ve enjoyed some of his work in the past, but this novel fell short of the mark.