Another winner by Joe Hill. It starts out as a horror story, when the main character, Ig, wakes up with a hangover and discovers that he has horns growing out of his forehead. And he now has the power to read people’s minds, if he touches them. And the thoughts he reads can be extremely upsetting. Enough so that he sends his grandmother rolling down a hill in her wheelchair.
We then regress in time to when Ig was a kid and he accepts a dare to ride down a hill on a shopping cart. Naked. This event sets in motion the rest of the book. Two people on the scene play pivotal points in the horrific events that follow.
Merrin, his future girlfriend and soul mate, ends up being raped and murdered, and guess who the prime suspect is? The other character, Lee, saves Ig’s life after Ig’s shopping cart misadventure dumps him in the nearby creek.
The rest of the story involves pitchforks, lots of snakes, a gold cross, and a treehouse of the mind. I’ll let you discover the significance of those objects yourself.
I wouldn’t classify this book as your traditional horror story, but it definitely has those elements. It’s more like a story of betrayal wrapped in a layer of terror. Kind of like a bacon on a cheeseburger. Eaten in a graveyard.