Horns

Locations
Call Number: Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Wealthy Ignatius Parish is possessed of a terrible new power to go with his terrible new look--a macabre talent he intends to use to find the monster who killed his wife Merrin and destroyed his life. Being good and praying for the best got him nowhere. It's time for a little revenge. It's time the devil had his due.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

An unlikely love story. submitted by eknapp on July 6, 2012, 8:37pm A young woman is raped and murdered, and it is widely believed that her boyfriend Ig not only did it but got away with it. On the anniversary of her death Ig wakes up with horns growing out of his forehead, and some strange new abilities.

...one of which is that people just start telling him things about themselves. Horrible things. (One point that bothered me: Why is EVERYONE in Hill's world a complete douchebag? Hill has a really low opinion of humanity. Not one reasonably benevolent person exists. It makes me wonder what goes on inside HIS head.)

Anyways, Horns starts out like a murder mystery. It isn't. Just as I was smugly patting myself on the back for determining the mostly likely perpetrator, he's revealed. Thud.

So what is Horns about then? It's primarily the story of Ig's transformation from man to demon, and what it means to be a (the?) devil. He's kind of a hero and sin isn't so bad...it has its place, serves a valuable function. Furthermore, the bad guy had some subtle goddish qualities (he fixes things, he "turns his life around", he spearheads a Christian congressman's campaign...) I felt vaguely blasphemous reading this.

Horns also turned out to be a love story, much to my surprise. And a good one. I don't usually go in for love stories so I was shocked at how much I found myself digging that aspect of the story.

The ending felt kind of lackluster...justice unsatisfyingly served, plot threads more or less wrapped up. Not bad, not good. About what you'd expect from a King progeny. But the first 43 chapters made up for it; good read.

Idle note: This is the 2nd Joe Hill story I've read where the villain suffered brain trauma as a child (The Cape being the first). Hill seems to believe that evil is made, not born.

Pretty good submitted by mrajraspn08 on August 18, 2016, 3:26pm Really interesting and clever. The end didn't go where I thought it would, and that was a disappointment, but still worth reading.

It was ok submitted by KOH on August 30, 2017, 9:07pm I got kinda annoyed with the unlikable characters, but it was interesting enough.

Genre-Crossing submitted by laurenmccarthya2 on June 18, 2018, 7:53am The mystery-solving surface plot layer is satisfying, but much more so is the gaze into the dark recesses of the hearts and souls of the "good townspeople". A timeless lesson.