Heart-Shaped Box

Gothic is a literary aesthetic and genre marked by fear and paranoia. The Castle of Otranto, a 1764 novel by Horace Walpole, is often credited as the origin of the genre. Many aesthetics and tropes in The Castle of Otranto—such as decaying buildings, entombed characters, and ghosts—have gone on to become genre mainstays. Later works by Bram Stoker and Daphne du Maurier developed the Gothic genre, providing a foundation for modern writers like father-son duo Stephen King and Joe Hill, whose works reflect 21st-century concerns.

Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box is a contemporary Gothic story, with its primary antagonist taking the form of a specter. Gothic scholars often borrow neurologist Sigmund Freud’s concept of “the return of the repressed” to describe ghosts in horror stories: The archetypal “ghost” is a past trauma that interrupts the present, forcing characters to deal with their trauma. Heart-Shaped Box makes ample use of this trope through Craddock’s ghost: He was a serial abuser in life, and his attempted sexual assault of Georgia triggers her history as a survivor. Furthermore, he resembles Jude’s abusive father, Martin. In grappling with Craddock, Florida, Georgia, and Jude must face their pasts.

Another Gothic trope that Hill uses is the “double.” Gothic fiction is full of doppelgangers and other doublings—from the eponymous duo in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the uneasy relationship between the narrator and titular character in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. In Heart-Shaped Box, Bammy has a deceased twin named Ruth; Craddock resembles Jude’s father, Martin; and Jude “realize[s] […] his home in New York resemble[s] the home of his childhood” (297). These doublings create a sense of unease, sometimes a link between past and present, raising the question of whether or not characters can ever truly escape their pasts. The oscillation of the similarly named Georgia and Florida on the “nightroad” also explores this tension between past and present: For Jude, it evokes the women’s shared trauma and raises the possibility of healing through identification with the past.