Total Number of Ratings: 11
Murmur - Episode #24 - Murmur Book Club: Horns
Wednesday, June 9, 2010 10:48 AM
June 9, 2010 - Paul Montgomery sits down with Murmur.com contributors Josh Christie and David Accampo to discuss Horns, the latest novel from Joe Hill (Heart-Shaped Box, Locke&Key). After a long night of dirty deeds, Ig Perrish wakes up to find a pair of stubby horns growing out of his temples. It's downright unsettling. Then come the confessions. People in town start sharing their deepest and darkest secrets with him, asking permission to do their damnedest. Let's not even start on what the snakes are doing. At the heart of it all is a mystery, a tale of lost love and rotten friendships. And not everybody's gonna dig it. Find out how it all shakes out.
Listen to the Podcast:
Music:
"She's Long Gone"
The Black Keys
I need to re-read 'Kavalier & Clay,' or AT LEAST the parts about the comics industry, now that I know much more about this stuff than I did 7 years ago. The fact it's not available on Kindle makes it less likely I'll reread in time for discussion (even though I own the book, I know it makes no sense), but in any case this is a favorite and I'll be looking forward to the discussion.
Has everybody read the Chabon short story in the intro to Brian K Vaughan's 'Escapists' TPB? It involves Brian K. Vaughan meeting Sam Clay. A real treat!
Really excellent podcast (even if I did come out of it thinking "maybe the 2 stars I gave 'Horns' on Goodreads was too many, if Josh gave it the same rating and isn't actually throwing things." ) No, but really -- the points of the people who liked it are good -- that first section is an excellent magical realist short story even if I don't subscribe to the view of human nature that it puts forward. And the discussion here did a nice job of summing up the arc of the book and how its structure worked.
The question of 'unlikable protagonists' is a tricky one, because that can mean a lot of different things. I actually have a weakness for main/major characters who are straight-up, unapologetic assholes, and I have nothing but praise for an author who can pull that off. (I think the recommendation I wrote when I read the first volume of the comic 'Phonogram' was "This is great! The protagonist is an incredible prick!!" But I'm sure that book turns some people off for the same reason). Ig's behaviors that I had a real problem with were the passive ones -- I got turned off to Ig for good when teenage Lee starts rhapsodizing about how much he loves to have sex with virgins, whether they like it or not, and even when they say they don't like it they really do!" and Ig was just like, "Okay, let's go blow up some cars." The guy from 'Beat the Reaper' may be a jerk, but I'm pretty sure he would have something to say to a guy who talked about his girlfriend (or, you know, Jean Grey*) like that. Or thrown him out the window. So when Ig pushes his horrid grandmother down a hill, at least he's DOING something.
About Merrin -- I hadn't thought of the 'manic pixie dream girl' idea but that idea definitely applies. Though I think MPDG's generally have some kind of *personality* which Merrin rarely got a chance to do. There is that one moment where she tells Ig she 'chose' him because she thought he would be fun to fuck with -- which made me think that maybe SHE was the villain and the murder was somehow a ruse -- but then it was never followed up. And I get that her story here is filtered through Ig and through Lee, but there are still ways for the author to dramatize the character in ways that give her dimensions, without changing point of view, and here she just doesn't have that many scenes. I think her longest scene is the one where she's breaking up with him, in which, we later find out, everything she said was a lie. So, a chapter from her viewpoint would certainly have been welcome (if I were writing this book, which nobody asked me to, I think I would have gone with alternating Ig, Lee, and Merrin sections) but I still think there was room to do more within the format that Hill picked.
*In the interest of full disclosure, it is entirely possible that I docked this book a star for talking about Jeannie that way. I know I drag Phoenixes into everything, but in this case it's text!
*Oh, I actually meant to say, "alternating Ig, Merrin and TERRY sections", since I don't care about Lee :).
heheh... I knew you'd have a lot to say about this one, Caroline -- I was very conscious of your comments in particular as we had our discussion. And I really can't argue with any of it.
I will say: Ig's passiveness reminds me, perhaps, of passiveness I've seen in myself. I kinda thought of him as "unaware" -- sort of off in his little dream world, not really thinking about anything outside of his few desires. But passive is probably a good word. I actually LIKED the exchange where Lee is saying some pretty nasty stuff and Ig just sorta lets it slide -- it rang true for me.
And I totally know what you mean about MPDG. That's why I wanted to reference that term but not definitely apply it here. I think she remains "dream girl" without the manic/pixie personality. But the concept is there.
Until you mentioned it, I forgot: I, too, had a few moments where I thought there was something up with Merrin that was less than innocent. The book definitely used the "mystery" of Merrin as a part of its structure. By NOT having her POV or her true motivations, it leaves the mystery of the plot as this selfish, fever-dream power struggle between Lee and the unaware, passive Ig.
I think there's a difference between letting something slide and -- just not noticing. Ig doesn't even have an internal reaction. He just chugs along worrying about whether he or Lee has 'ownership' of Merrin and seems a lot more worried about which one of them has dibs on the girl, and not whether, if she does end up with Lee, she's going to end up being harmed by him. And this is bordering on stuff that's external to the book, but I think women (overgeneralizing like hell, of course, but sort of taking a stab at the id-places a book like this is hitting) are afraid of someone like Lee, but we're also afraid that "nice" people like Terry and Ig are sort of silent co-conspirators of his. Ig has every reason to know what kind of person Lee is, but Merrin presumably doesn't, because she's not privy to the "guy talk." So, to steal a metaphor from the book, Ig is keeping a pet snake that he knows is poisonous but he doesn't bother to let the person he supposedly loves know about it. That's the scariest thing in the book, to me, and if I thought it was a chord Hill was hitting on purpose, I'd be impressed, but I can't help thinking it just doesn't occur to him.
I think the key point you mention there is that we're not privvy to a reaction from Ig. As I read it, it felt to me like the narration was keeping Ig's thoughts a little closed to us -- as opposed to Lee where we go fully inside.
The early stuff with Lee when they were kids -- I guess I kinda buy it because I remember teenage boys saying some terrible things about teenage girls. I don't think that it automatically means you're aware that the person is a sociopath. I think I felt like Ig was going through this sort of very selfish struggle with a "code of honor" for the guy who saved him and a forceful "love" for Merrin. I honestly don't know if he was unaware of Lee's true nature or just couldn't bring himself to stand up to it. I think we can say that he's not the sort of leader or commanding presence that would do anything remotely heroic.
But now you've got me worried that by not feeling like Ig is repugnant I stand to tarnish my own reputation. :D
I promise, even as a kid, *I* would have distanced myself from Lee. :D
Dave, you made that point on the podcast, about the audience being distant from Ig's viewpoint. I think you're right about that, and that might explain what's going on in the flashback scenes a lot better than my explanation does. And don't worry, I'm not at all trying to reply that I blame readers for reacting to the scenes in a certain way :). It's more that I'm trying to get at why I was turned off by these characters. I think an issue with horror as a genre (though it can also be true of fantasy or really, of any kind of story) is that it's playing around with deep-seated fears, and everybody is going to be frightened by different things. I feel like this book dealt with something I find really frightening and instinctively want to see handled a certain way, and went in a totally different direction with it. So it's a matter of what I find scary in the story and the story that the author is interested in telling diverging from each other pretty sharply. The book doesn't address the parts that I find troubling because that's not what the book is about, and at a certain point I just have to shrug and say 'oh well.'
Respond
The next book is THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY, eh? I read the book during my undergraduate career and remember liking it, but very little of it has stayed with me. It'd be great to reread it, but I don't think I've got the time right now for it. Disappointing. Perhaps if my library owned an audiobook version of it, that might work, but I'm out of luck there. Curses!
Next time, Murmur Book Club. I'll have to join you all again next time.