In today’s New York Times resident pop fiction reviewer Janet Maslin gives a favorable review to a first novel by Joe Hill. Calling it a Valentine from Hell, Maslin praised Heart-Shaped Box  as a “wild, mesmerizing, perversely witty tale of horror”. And who is this Joe Hill? None other than Joseph Hillstrom King, the son of you-know-who. While our reviewer Kart G. Siewert of the Tulsa City County Library noted some predictability in the plot, he called the novel “a wrenching and effective ghost story…that reads like good early [Stephen] King mixed with some of the edgier splatterpunk sensibilities of David J. Schow (The Kill Riff)”.

I know there will be high demand for this title, but make sure your patrons don’t confuse with it with April Henry’s amateur sleuth mystery Heart-Shaped Box. However, this might be the perfect time to steal a page from Entertainment Weekly and do a reader’s advisory display of novels with the same titles. A Battle of the Books! How about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas versus Liam Callanan’s The Cloud Atlas? Or Geraldine Brooks’s March duking it out with E.L. Doctorow’s The March? Or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man going head to head with  H.G. Well’s Invisible Man? Check out  library blog Papercuts for more suggestions.