Word: hill
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...oldest stories in literature: a boy goes forth into the world, forsaking his past, only to return home as a man and discover that it was where he was always meant to be. And so it was for Joe Hill. After years of getting nowhere peddling middlebrow literary fiction ("stories about divorce and children trying to figure out their parents," he calls them today), Hill began to write tales of murderers, evil spirits and giant bugs--the kinds of subject matter better associated with his father Stephen King. And like the heroes of such stories, Hill (who writes under...
...took his time getting there. Hill, 37, spent more than a decade trying his hand at a variety of genres (a thriller in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, a children's tale, a 900-page fantasy novel) with no bites from publishers. "I began to think I might not be able to cut it as a novelist," he says. So he scaled back, and in 2005 a small British press released a collection of his short stories, the touching, terrifying 20th Century Ghosts. It was followed two years later by the best-selling Heart-Shaped Box, a novel about...
...Horns, Hill dispenses with such supernatural supporting players in favor of the big dude himself: the Devil. His main character, Ig Perrish, wakes one morning to discover horns growing out of his head. Suddenly, people begin to tell Ig their deepest, darkest thoughts and all the awful things they've done to others. "I wanted to see, if you knew everyone's worst secrets, could you still love them?" says Hill over burgers and beer at a Boston pub. "Everyone has terrible ideas. And if that's the side of you that the Devil sees, then no wonder he hates...
That empathy with the Devil--taking a despicable character and slowly bringing us around to his side--is the sort of thing Hill does best. It's also what's missing from so much of the girl-meets-vampire gruel that dominates the genre these days. "The writer's first job in horror fiction is to convince the reader that there is a real person there to care about," says Hill. "If you don't have that, you don't have anything...
...Freedom (YAF) happy hour to celebrate the launch of New Guard magazine at Murphy's Pub in Woodley Park; various receptions with conservative stars such as Ann Coulter and Monica Crowley; an XPAC comedy night; and the 6th annual Reaganpalooza Saturday at the Hawk and Dove bar on Capitol Hill. "This is like our Woodstock," said Jason Mattera, a spokesman for Young America's Foundation, in a speech at CPAC. "Except that our women are beautiful, we speak in complete sentences, and our notion of freedom doesn't consist of snorting cocaine, which is certainly one thing that separates...