Horns by Joe Hill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one hell of a fun novel.

Let me get rid of all the side stuff first... I'm reading this because I respect Joe Hill on his own merits and it's far from the first novel I've read of his. That being said, EVEN IF it wasn't Joe Hill, I had a fantastic time reading this!

Let's take the whole devil trope and turn it into a body/psychological horror novel, shall we? But let's turn away from the outside agency angle. :) Add a bit of the Lucifer tv show angle, add a few horns on Ig's head and the inability for anyone to quite remember that they had just been talking to an apparent demon or that they just spilled all their most horrible thoughts to the guy, and run with this.

This is fantastically sick. Difficult. Pleasurable, even. In the, oh god, everyone really thinks THIS of me already, why don't I give them something to REALLY munch on kind of way. :)

But then the novel became something a lot deeper when we got into the flashbacks and the love story. We get into the heads of the people who did him some serious harm thanks to a bit of touch-telepathy flashback power going on as Ig turns into a demon. The reveals hinted at only get more twisted and allegory-ish as we move on, but you know what I like best about this?

The devil never gets to be the hero. We WANT him to be the hero, tho, and that's what's really great about this.

So two thumbs WAY up. :) I never once got bored. I FELT something for these characters. :)

And no, I'm probably not going to watch the movie made from this. I don't want to spoil my very positive reaction. :)

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