There are a number of ways to decide if you want to read any given book, including back-cover blurbs.I'm half-way through Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box and just took a peek at the advance praise on the dust jacket. It includes:
"Heart-Shaped Box is, quite simply, the best debut horror novel since Clive Barker's Damnation Game, twenty years ago. It's the kind of book that the overworked adjectives people use on book jackets — relentless, gripping, powerful, a genuine page-turner — were really meant to describe, for it's all of those things, and enormously smart besides. A genuinely scary novel filled with people you care about; the kind of book that still stays in your mind after you've turned over the final page. I loved it unreservedly."I think they get it just about right.
--Neil Gaiman
I started reading Heart-Shaped Box late one evening and never put it down. The house could have caught fire and I never would have noticed. Joe Hill's debut novel is rich with moments of terror and redemption and strangeness, but it's also that rare beast of a book that hooks you from the very first paragraph and doesn't let go. Books as good as this book, characters as interesting and likeable as these characters, writers like Joe Hill, don't come along very often and when they do, you feel like celebrating. But why waste time reading a blurb when you could be starting in on the first couple of pages? Bet you keep on reading.
--Kelly Link
--Marshal Zeringue