as Paul Kavanagh. That book is less like a novel, more like getting mugged in an alley.” Such Men Are Dangerous was the story of an ex-soldier who had done ugly things in the war and come home looking to do some ugly things right here. While it has been decades since I read it, I think my dad’s assessment was roughly correct. Bradbury’s sentences were firecrackers on a summer night. Kavanagh’s were blows from a lead pipe. Larry Block seemed like a real nice guy. Paul Kavanagh didn’t.
Around that time I started to wonder who I’d be if I weren’t me anymore.
I WROTE THREE OTHER NOVELS in my high-school years. They shared one common artistic thread: They all sucked. Even then, though, I understood that this was normal. Prodigies are almost always tragic figures, who blaze hot for a couple of years and are reduced to cinders by the time they’re twenty. Everyone else has to do it the slow way, the hard way, one dull shovel-load of dirt at a time. That slow, hard work rewards a person by building up the mental and emotional muscles, and possibly establishing a firmer foundation on which to build a career. Then, when setbacks come, you’re ready for them. After all, you’ve faced them before.
In college, naturally enough, I began to think about trying to get some of my stories published. I was afraid, though, to submit work under my own name. So far, I knew, I had not written anything worth reading. How would I know when I’d written something good, really good? I worried I might send out a crummy book and someone would publish it anyway, because they saw a chance to make a quick buck on the last name. I was insecure, often gripped by peculiar (and unrealistic) anxieties, and I needed to know, for myself, that when I sold a story, it sold for the right reasons.
So I dropped my last name and began writing as Joe Hill. Why Hill? It was an abbreviated form of my middle name, Hillström—and in retrospect, oh, man, what was I thinking, right? The umlaut is the hardest-rocking unit of punctuation in the English language, and I have one in my name, and I didn’t use it. My one chance to be metal, and I blew it.
I also thought I’d better avoid writing scary stories, that I should try to find my own material. So I wrote a mess of New Yorker–style tales about divorce, raising difficult children, and midlife anxiety. These stories had some good lines here and there and not much else to recommend them. I didn’t have much to say about divorce—I’d never been married! Same for raising difficult kids. The only experience I had with difficult kids was being one. And since I was in my mid-twenties, I was spectacularly unqualified to write about midlife breakdowns.
Aside from all that, the real challenge of trying to write a good New Yorker story was that I didn’t like New Yorker stories. In my free time, I was reading fucked-up horror comics by Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, not tales of middle-class ennui by Updike and Cheever.
At some point, probably about two hundred rejections in, I had a minor revelation. It was true that if I was out there writing as Joseph King, it would be awkward to start banging out horror stories. It would look like I was grabbing at my dad’s coattails with both fists. But Joe Hill was just another Joe Schmo. No one knew anything about Hill’s father and mother. He could be whatever kind of artist he wanted to be—and what he wanted to be was Tom Savini, on the page.
You get the life you’re dealt, and if you’re going to write, that’s your ink. It’s the only ink you get. Mine was just very red.
When I gave myself permission to start writing weird tales of the supernatural, all my problems vanished almost overnight, and before you could say New York Times bestseller, I was—hahahahahaha, just kidding. I still had piles and piles of shit to write. I churned out another four novels that never went anywhere. There was Paper Angels, a third-rate Cormac McCarthy pastiche. There was a young adult fantasy novel, The Evil Kites of Dr. Lourdes (no, fuck YOU, that’s a great title). There was The Briars, a confused, unsuccessful effort to write a John D. MacDonald–style thriller about two teenagers on a summer kill spree. The best of them was