Joseph-Beth is one of America's biggest independent bookstores, a 45,000-square-foot reader's cathedral in Lexington, Kentucky that inspires Grand Central Station–ish reverence and has a restaurant called the Brontë Bistro. Full bar, $18 sirloin. The arrival of writer Joe Hill, 45, very tall, was recently heralded by limited edition illustrated posters indistinguishable from Halloween rock show fliers. With a waxing and waning Maine accent and dark hair consuming his eyebrows, Hill entertained audience of 300, unclipping the mic from its podium and pacing a few yards from a fridge-size shelf labeled STEPHEN KING.
Forty-five minutes in, one reader of both Hill and King (the Venn diagram could easily be a total eclipse) wanted to know what kind of bedtime stories Hill was told as a kid. He quoted a Leno joke about Stephen King's children—Joseph Hillstrom King, his sister Naomi, and brother Owen—being the rare type to beg not to hear one. "It's a funny joke, right," Hill didn't at all concede, "but it's also...it's also kinda stupid. I mean, yeah, professionally he's a scary guy. But if your dad was a urologist, it's not like he's gonna come home to dinner and be like, 'How was your day? How's your prick doing? Good? How's your prick?'"
Closer than the King display were tables stacked with copies of Strange Weather, Hill's vigorously paced, rigorously imaginative quartet of novellas played in four very different keys. Tucked and towering around those were five more works of fiction and at least a dozen graphic novel hardcovers. When the reading and Q&A wrapped and fans started queuing up to meet Hill, a middle-aged employee nervously leaned over the microphone, introducing himself as a bookseller of 22 years who just needed to say he'd never read a book better than Locke & Key, holding volumes of the comic to his chest, begging the crowd to spread the word.
Hill's new collection doesn't work hard to be scary, but the story "Loaded" does fuck the reader up, badly, ending on the harshest possible moment. "The part I cut out is what happens next," Hill told GQ a couple hours before the Lexington event, in the restaurant off his Marriott's lobby. "A unicorn bursts through the door and [redacted] is speared through the chest on the horn and everyone is saved and it’s a happy ending after all."
It's in fact so unhappy Hill almost ended it "with the exact same sentence that ends 'Apt Pupil,'" Stephen King's Different Seasons story about a teenager and a neighbor/secret former Nazi enabling each other's worst tendencies and psychoses until...you want to throw up, cry, and never read again. But "Loaded" is also bleedingly current, starring "the scariest figure in America, the gun nut," in what Hill called an examination of "every facet of gun violence as it exists in America right now," including child deaths, military veteran suicides, and police brutality. All while wildfire spreads choking black smoke across the Floridian setting for weeks.
Each of Strange Weather's stories has a similarly sharp hooks and dazzling execution, the type of brew that gets people doing what the bookstore employee hoped: foisting copies on each other. A skydiver gets stranded on a shapeshifting, sentient cloud; the Polaroid Man's camera steals memories; crystal spikes pour down instead of rain. (Donald Trump tweets, "OUR ENEMIES DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY STARTED! PAYBACK IS A BITCH!!!")
Joe King has explained many times why he decided to write as Joe Hill, but perhaps never so simply as at Joseph-Beth: the pen name assured that if he was able to sell a story, it would be "for the right reasons—because someone liked it, not because someone liked my dad." He was terrified Joe King would get published before his work was worthy, then lambasted, remaindered, and retired. He spent time after graduating Vassar trying New Yorker–y short stories, not finding success until the end of his twenties, when he allowed himself to tap into the fantastical with "Pop Art," about a friendship between two boys, one made of inflatable plastic.
A small-press short story collection followed in England; Hill, whose identity secrecy extended to editors and agents—either jokingly or truly suspects it only happened because they wanted to publish "Pop Art." Heart-Shaped Box, his U.S. debut, arrived in 2007. Hill had maintained a daily writing routine since age 13, completing four or five books as a teen and four more as an adult, and was now, at the cusp of 35, finally putting out a novel—a ghost story.
A 2013 New York Times Magazine feature about the five authors in the King family (Tabitha, married to Stephen, has eight novels; Owen and Kelly Braffett are novelists as well) briefly mentioned that Hill's parents supported him, his wife, and young sons financially in that pre-success era, "never once suggesting that he might want to re-examine his options." Asked for details in Lexington, Hill said, "I did for several years in my twenties essentially live off the largesse of my parents while I tried to write," adding that there's "the part that makes me sound really good"—the pseudonym—"and the part that makes me sound less great."
Around 25, becoming a financially solvent author was further away than he'd hoped. "I sort of put aside my pride and started writing screenplays as Joseph King," said Hill. "And my brother and I wrote screenplays together. And so I have this sordid former career where I wrote and everyone knew, everyone knew who my dad was, and Owen and I wrote stuff, and we got rejections too. It didn’t really matter...we got screenplays turned down all the time."
One eventual sale with his brother "was our paycheck for like five years." Working Title, the production company behind decades of Coen Bros. films as well as this summer's Baby Driver, bought the King Bros.' supernatural murder mystery Fadeaway. "After three years of working on it, we came up with a script that up to this day I still feel is one of the best things I’ve ever been involved with," Hill said.
But he learned selling a script doesn’t mean anything's coming to theaters. "The movie got filmed and became an enormous hit in my imagination, but in real life, we got it to this perfect moment," he said, before a producer switcheroo led to three or four more rewrites, "defacing it horribly, trying to satisfy people who didn't wanna make the film anyway."
Today, every one of Hill's novels has been optioned in Hollywood, and the Strange Weather novellas may follow. He's spent most of 2017 writing scripts, some with C. Robert Cargill (Doctor Strange, Sinister), for a potential Locke & Key series at Hulu. The pilot has been entrusted to Andy and Barbara Muschietti, who just made the new biggest horror movie of all time with It, based on a book dedicated to Joe and his siblings. (The Shining, though, was only "for Joe Hill King, who shines on.") Hill's dark and striking comic, illustrated by Chilean artist Gabriel Rodriguez and fantastic in both senses of the word, centers on three young kids facing monsters and mysteries in New England, a good omen having seen It.
"They really care about those kids," Hill said of the Muschiettis and their Losers' Club. (You could be forgiven, perusing Instagram, for thinking the brother/sister, director/producer duo are the It kids' parents, aunt and uncle, or cool older siblings.) "My dad worked It into every phone conversation for like six months 'cause he was so excited. I could be like, 'Dad, I have this burning sensation when I pee,' and he'd be like, 'Boy, you better get that taken care of, kid, 'cause pretty soon It will be out and you won't wanna walk out of the movie theater to have to go to the bathroom." That night in Lexington, Hill tweeted his top horror films. At No. 5, below The Thing but above The Exorcist, was "IT (2017)."
Over the course of a decade, being dubbed a modern master of horror more and more with each release, Hill's early hangups have melted away. What he calls himself, the way he writes, whether or not he'd please that night's crowd, how well the book would sell—that night, nothing fazed him except mayo in his beard and letting his manners slip while tending to an important burger. He and his three teenage sons had a new pact to eat beef only once a month. After the next day's seventh and final book-tour date, he'd reward himself at home in New Hampshire by hunkering down with his youngest to watch the new season of Stranger Things, that show that reminds everyone of you-know-who.