This was a year before my own first collection came out, and so it was a rare pleasure to not only get to meet Hill, whose earlier works I had already read and enjoyed, but to appear on a panel with him where we discussed short story writing. But he was already working on it-perhaps even finished with it-and he talked about it at the World Horror Convention in Austin, Texas. In 2011, Hill hadn’t yet released his third novel, NOS4A2, which would come out in 2013. He has worked on comic books and written (as-yet unproduced) scripts for television, and his work has been adapted to film-in 2014, director Alexandre Aja helmed an adaptation of Hill’s second novel, Horns.Īll of that can make Hill’s oeuvre feel a tad overwhelming for newcomers, but before we dig too far into where to start if you’re new to Hill, I want to take a short detour to tell a story. Since then, Hill has published three more novels, a book of essays, and a second short story collection, with a third, entitled Full Throttle, due out in October 2019. By then, Hill’s secret identity was out in the open, and the novel nabbed Bram Stoker and International Thriller Writers Awards for Best First Novel. In 2007, Hill followed up with his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, a tale about a fading rock star who acquires a dead man’s funeral suit-and inherits the vengeful ghost who once wore it.

It secured him a Bradbury Fellowship as well as the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and International Horror Guild Awards for Best Collection. Hill, who assumed a shortened version of his name as a pseudonym in order to succeed or fail on his own merits rather than those of his famous father, made his first big splash on the literary scene with the 2005 publication of his debut short fiction collection, 20th Century Ghosts. But you don’t get all those awards just by being your father’s son, and Hill has carved out an impressive reputation of his own in the literary world. You could say that Hill comes by his talents naturally, and it’s certainly true that he’s followed in his father’s footsteps-just about all of his novels, short stories, and comic books land solidly in the horror genre.

20th century ghosts joe hill