Welcome! We're back to our regular scheduled programming with Book Club! This means its back to choosing a new book every month and seeing where that take us! To start off our new round we did Horns by Joe Hill, son of the famed Stephen King (if you didn't already know).
The plot follows Ig Parrish after he wakes up from a bender on the one-year anniversary of his girlfriend's death to horns growing out of his head. Everyone around him starts confessing their sins to him so he decides to use his new found power to try and find her killer.
I honestly don't even know where to start with this book. The ratings of it were mixed. Valid points were made for and against the book. I personally was kind of okay with it. It definitely kept me engaged and I wanted to keep reading. However, some parts of it were hard to get through and other parts made NO sense at all -- 'tree house of the mind' anyone?
None of the characters were likable, and the two that had any redeeming qualities - Terry and Glenda - they still weren't that great. It was nice at the end of the novel that these two had decently wrapped up and happy endings, because no one else in the novel did. It was a crazy mess from start to finish with the amount of bizarre and ridiculous stuff that went down. Like I said, I really don't know where to go with this book.
We did agree, when discussing the book, that the flashback parts to when the characters are teenagers were the most real and best written parts. However, there were some really problems with the story as well... it is homophobic, racist and every female character is a given a Madonna-whore complex. In fact, the representation of every single female in the book is really, really bad. We talked about this aspect at length. It also didn't help that none of the characters had any growth throughout the novel either.
"Horror is genre of literature, film, and television that is meant to scare, startle, shock, and even repulse audiences. The key focus of a horror novel, horror film, or horror TV show is to elicit a sense of dread in the reader through frightening images, themes and situations" (www.masterclass.com). I mostly thought this book was just shocking. If you've read it, do you think it fits the horror genre?
Anyway, Janean did find a really funny Goodreads review of it in the form of a drinking game. It was quite the crack up: find it here. We agreed that we could get quite drunk following the rules of the game.
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Of course I watched the 2013 adaptation of the book starring good ol' Dan Rad. And... I have no words. Like I was completely stunned the whole time...
The people confessing their sins parts were so awkward and uncomfortably hilarious. It was jarring to go between the serious parts of Ig trying to deal with his situation and the bizarre parts of the horrible CGI snakes and cring-y confessions. The made Terry so damaged in the film that I didn't not like his character at all. Just so many questionable decisions on what was going in this film.
And then there was the ending! Like... What the actual fuck?! I can't.. I just can't... I'm done. Wow.
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