One morning Ignatius Perrish, the bedeviled hero of Joe Hill’s “Horns,” wakes up to find that he has been transformed overnight. Suddenly there are knobby little horns growing out of his head. When he talks to people they don’t recoil at them, but they do feel impelled to fall into trances and voice their most unspeakable thoughts.
When he visits a doctor, the man shrugs at the horn thing, expresses his own desire to snort drugs and chase a teenage girl, and registers irritation with his pesky patients. “All any of you care about is yourselves,” the self-involved doctor complains.
The strange thing about “Horns” is that its opening scenes aren’t all that strange. Its author, Joe Hill, is able to make Ig’s problem seem like the most natural thing in the world. Mr. Hill writes with such palpable enthusiasm that he has no trouble hooking readers, especially with a book that is clearly on the side of the angels, though hellbent on using every devil reference it can. Although Mr. Hill is no mere trickster, “Horns” does manage to get its devil into a blue dress with ridiculous ease.
“Horns” begins a little shakily. Ig’s first couple of posthorn encounters verge on the reflexively grotesque, so it takes a while for Mr. Hill’s inventiveness to show. But soon Ig is exploring the real thoughts of those who have always been outwardly kind to him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/books/25book.html?th&emc=th
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
