The pen name of Stephen King’s son, who published Heart-Shaped Box in 2007, is Joe Hill. His birth name is Joseph Hillström King, and he adopted the shorter name partly to establish a literary identity separate from his famous father.
Joe Hill’s first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, was published by William Morrow on February 13, 2007. It is a horror story about Judas Coyne, an aging rock musician who buys a dead man’s suit advertised as haunted. The novel combines supernatural suspense with themes of guilt, abuse, and the destructive afterlife of family secrets.
Hill was already an award-winning writer before his first novel. His 2005 collection 20th Century Ghosts won major genre honors, including the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection. Heart-Shaped Box later won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel and reached number eight on The New York Times bestseller list.
A common mix-up is to call Joe Hill simply “Stephen King Jr.” That is not his professional name, and it overlooks his independent career as a novelist, short-story writer, and comic-book writer. He also created the comic series Locke & Key.