As a sickly obsessed Stephen King fan, I felt obligated to read Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box out of a perverted sense of loyalty. Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. Heart-Shaped Box is his first novel.

In his introduction to ‘Salem’s Lot, his second published novel, Stephen King writes about the difference between “good trash” and “bad trash,” a difference first taught to him by his mother. Though his mother would die before the book was finished, King knows she would think of ‘Salem’s Lot as trash, but hopes she would recognize it as good trash.

Heart-Shaped Box is trash, but it is not bad trash. Though comparisons between Joe Hill and his father aren’t really fair, they’re unavoidable. Heart-Shaped Box bears such a striking similarity to an early Stephen King (or Richard Bachman) novel, that it is virtually indistinguishable from either. The novel is a simple and effective horror story that stands toe-to-toe with many of King’s own.

Hill’s novel features a protagonist ripped straight from the pages of his father’s work. Both a down-homey everyman and a famous popular artist dealing with the personal demons of his past – two of King’s favorite archetypes – Judas “Jude” Coyne is an “aging death-metal rock god” (so sayeth the book’s jacket) with a fascination for the darker elements of human nature. A collector of macabre artifacts – a South American snuff film, a cookbook for cannibals, sketches by John Wayne Gacy – Jude buys a dead man’s suit, ghost included, from an Internet auction site (not eBay). He gets more than he bargained for when the ghost turns out to be the real deal and begins stalking Jude, threatening him with his bladed hypnotist’s pendulum. Following a foreshadowed discovery of the power of animal familiars, Jude and his live-in girlfriend Georgia (one of many female companions named after their state of origin) are forced into a supernatural cross-country chase to discover the mysterious origin of their spiritual assassin.

What follows is an engrossing, and often genuinely chilling, story of redemption. Quickly moving beyond its initial premise, Heart-Shaped box is as moving as it is thrilling, as charming as it is disturbing. Written with the same sort of crudely poignant bluntness King himself employs (check the dorkclub.com archives!), Hill quickly establishes a welcoming, conversational rhythm intercut with episodes of gruesome violence and bodily harm that upset even my desensitized stomach. The novel has no delusions of grandeur: this is a horror story designed to appeal to our baser instincts, and it does so with alarming effectiveness. This is the sort of book that is easy to pick up and lose hours to without even blinking.

Given the novel’s leading man, Hill saturates his book with heavy metal references. His characters often liken events in their lives to songs they know (just like in a Stephen King story!), but here the songs and bands referenced are all of the death rock variety. Though initially charming, the constant intercutting of real musicians with the fictional events of the novel and the romanticization of Life On The Road wear thin quickly. Also annoying is the fact that every minor character instantly recognizes Judas Coyne and needs to share their opinion about his music with him. Honestly, how many death-metal gods could you recognize walking down the street?

Still, the concept of a horror-obsessed shock rocker faced with the real version of the content of his stage performance makes for an interesting premise. The book is certainly a better piece of genre fiction than any of Rob Zombie’s movies. And though it makes for a great read, and is an undeniably impressive debut novel, its similarities to a Stephen King novel in both style and content are rather unfortunate. I love Stephen King, but the world already has one. Joe Hill is obviously a talented guy, but hopefully with his next book he’ll prove that an apple can fall further from the tree.