A little over a month ago, when Geoff Nicholson savaged Heart-Shaped Box for NYTBR, he remarked rather disingenously, “The publicity declines to tell us… that Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King. I don’t know the significance of that omission…” Although the answer should be fairly obvious, Hill (left) spells it out in the middle of a Times magazine profile by Ben Neihart: “I felt like if I wrote as Joseph King I might not want to write genre fiction, but if I wrote as Joe Hill, I could write whatever I wanted. So that’s what I did. I had 10 years to write and not have the pressure of being a famous guy’s kid.”
So it wasn’t until just before the publication of Box that the family connection became an issue. Heck, when I first discovered Hill’s stories, I just thought the name was an allusion to a famous 20th-century ghost; I was half-right, since it turns out Hill’s parents actually named him after the slain labor activist. William Morrow promised to make every effort not to capitalize on the relationship in promoting the novel, and yet, in the same way that Viking patted itself on the back for not trying to sell Marisha Pessl as a Pretty Young Thing, the majority of the media attention Hill’s gotten—like the AP profile also running this weekend or last month’s USA Today feature—play off that theme…perhaps proving the point Nicolson couldn’t grasp. (AOL’s interview with Hill offers a notable exception to the trend.) Likewise, literary comparisons to his father’s work are somewhat inevitable; then again, any contemporary “dark fantasy” (which is what they seem to be calling horror more and more these days) writers are likely to find themselves compared to King in some form or another. Hill’s got it lucky: Heart-Shaped Box reminds readers of King’s stories for all the right reasons, and in some ways it proves to have a leaner, sleeker momentum. He’ll be a writer to keep an eye on, not for where he’s come from, but for where he’s going.