Horns (novel)
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| Author | Joe Hill |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre |
Contemporary fantasy Gothic fiction Supernatural fiction |
| Publisher | William Morrow |
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Publication date
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February 16, 2010 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 370 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 419855424 |
Horns is a 2010 dark fantasy novel by Joe Hill and is the author's second published novel. The novel also incorporates elements of contemporary fantasy, crime fiction, and Gothic fiction. It employs the third-person omniscient, nonlinear narrative in telling the story of Ig Perrish, who—in the aftermath of his girlfriend Merrin Williams' mysterious rape and murder—awakes one morning to find horns growing from his head and diabolical powers at his command.
The novel consists of fifty chapters grouped into five sections of ten chapters each, named as follows:
26-year-old Ignatius "Ig" Perrish wakes up one morning after a drunken night (in the woods containing an old foundry, near where his girlfriend's corpse was discovered) to find that he has sprouted bony, sensitive horns from his temples. Ig is the second son of a renowned musician and the younger brother of a rising late-night TV star, Terry Perrish. Ig had position and security within his hometown of Gideon, New Hampshire, but the rape and murder of his girlfriend, Merrin Williams, changed all that. Despite his innocence, and although he was neither charged nor tried, Ig is largely considered guilty in public opinion.
As Ig leaves the apartment he shares with his friend with benefits, Glenna Nicholson, he notices that she is strangely honest with him about her desire to binge, her feelings about his unwanted presence, and the fact that she performed oral sex on a mutual high school friend of theirs, Lee Tourneau, the previous night. As Ig goes to a medical clinic to deal with the growth of his horns, he discovers that people have a sudden compulsion to blatantly express their ugliest and most animalistic urges, desires, and opinions to him, and that no one (neither those whom he already knows nor those he meets for the first time) seems surprised to see the horns. Moreover, when he makes skin-to-skin contact with individuals, he immediately learns their identities and some of their darkest secrets. They forget about their conversations with him as soon as they're over, as well as forgetting about the horns.
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