In HEART-SHAPED BOX by Joe Hill, aging heavy metal rocker Judas Coyne, for whom music was a way to exorcise the rage of his abusive childhood, now lives in calm, ambling semi-retirement on a remote farm in New York State, where he manages his money with the help of personal assistant Danny, engages in serial monogamy with a string of young Goth girlfriends he nicknames after the state they’re from, and collects oddities, even a snuff film. When the opportunity to buy a real ghost online (with ownership attained by buying the dead old man’s suit) arrives via an eBay-type site, he grabs it.

The suit arrives in a heart-shaped box.

So does the ghost.

And this purchase wasn’t random. It was a set up. Because this ghost has a very deep, personal score to settle with Jude.

HEART-SHAPED BOX reinvented the ghost story for me. It’s great horror. Hill gets virtually everything right as a writer, but his real talent in this book is creating larger-than-life characters. The ghost is simply one of the most menacing, evil and loathsome villains I’ve seen in horror fiction. Recommended.

20th CENTURY GHOSTS by Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son, is a collection of speculative fiction that amazed me with its psychologically disturbing and unsettling material. I’m not normally a fan of short stories, particularly anthologies by the same author, but nearly every story in this book grabbed me with its truth, realism and escalating tension. Recommended.

In THE STORE by Bentley Little, a Walmart-type giant store comes to a small Arizona town, promising huge economic gains. At first, the citizens of Juniper are dazzled at the amazing array of products on the shelves offered at discount prices. Then the giant retailer begins to suck the life out of the town like a giant parasite, killing local businesses and soon after the local government with lack of revenue and commitment to expensive concessions. Little’s a great writer and the story flows along, focusing on one man who fights back to protect his family and try to save his community.

The basic plot suggests a social realism novel about the proven costs and benefits large discount retailing has on small communities, and it delivers on this. But Little goes much farther than that into something that reads like both satire and a cautionary tale. The giant retailer, The Store, takes over the town government, issues its own laws, builds a bizarre cult of personality among its employees around the corporation’s founder, sells unsafe and bizarre products, hires sadistic managers, violates privacy, humiliates its workforce, forces people into debt with dire consequences for default, and many other horrible acts.

But this is a horror novel, and the extremes to which The Store goes to control all aspects of life in the town, the sadism of its top managers, the Night Managers, the ritual humiliation of the employees, the evil at the core of the corporation and its founder, and the understanding that the Store is spreading everywhere around the country, puts it squarely in horror territory.

Good horror titillates but occasionally makes you think, and THE STORE accomplishes that. But the horror elements are purely seasoning for its social realism and satirical goals. For this reader, THE STORE is primarily a dystopic vision of corporate power run amok.

I was far more horrified by how easily the town surrendered everything it treasured for a wider selection of products at lower prices. I consider myself a citizen first, a worker second, and a consumer third. As a citizen, I want just laws and maximum liberty. As a worker, I want to sell my labor without being exploited. As a consumer, I want access to things I want at a reasonable cost. I sometimes feel like America’s greatest weakness is we’ve become a nation of consumers, with severe consequences. THE STORE embodies these fears, taking them into the realm of horror.