Horns by Joe Hill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Horns was very easy to read, but surprisingly tough to review.
The reason being is that it’s hard to give you a feeling for Horns without letting out some story spoilers, so if you’d like to read Horns by Joe Hill unspoiled then all you need to know is that it’s good, and worth your time to read it. You should also stop reading now.
Horns by Joe Hill, is the story of Ig. Iggy to his friends and Ignatius on his birth certificate. Ig wakes up one morning with a dreadful hangover, some fuzzy yet blasphemous memories and a pair of horns growing out of his forehead. The horns aren’t a metaphor; they’re made of bone and firmly attached to Ig’s skull. The horns give Ig the ability to get people to tell him their darkest secrets and desires.
Unfortunately the horns can’t make them stop telling Ig their darkest secrets and desires, no matter how much he’d like them too.
No matter how much grief the horns give Ig though, he has even bigger problems. The entire town thinks he raped and murdered his girlfriend Merrin. Ig didn’t do it, but thanks to the horns he quickly finds out who did. What follows is a bloody, sometimes funny tale of revenge and pointy beards.
Horns is easy reading. Despite its length I finished it in two days. Granted, I finished it at 2am, but that’s beside the point. I think the book’s greatest strength is in its main character, Ig. Despite the fact hat Ig is quite literally becoming a demon, you can’t help but root for him, no matter what he does. Part of that is in the fact that the terrible things Ig does to people are often richly deserved.
The other part of rooting for Ig is that his antagonist is legitimately scary. All too often in supernaturally themed books the more mundane bad guys are dog food the moment the hero gets their first power. The bad guy in Horns never acquires any metaphysical abilities, but Joe Hill writes him as a straight sociopath and gets across how dangerous someone with zero empathy can really be.
I enjoyed Horns and it’s slotted itself into my top five of the year for 2010. I’m looking forward to seeing what Joe Hill does next.
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