I’ve started reading Joe Hill‘s excellent Heart-Shaped Box and was really trying to keep the reading to daylight as the book seem to scare me shitless every time I think I have it all figured out.

Anyone familiar with the plot of Heart-Shaped Box know that the item that sets all the maladies and mayhem in motion is a dead man’s suit bought over the Internet. The suit apparently is accompanied by a ghost and the main character Jude’s life more or less goes south after receiving the suit.

Jude buys the suit because someone sent him an e-mail thinking the item would interest him.

Anyway, Joe Hill, the author, is as I am a LibraryThing user and I found his profile and library when plotting in the book in my library. He and I share a couple of great books so I flagged his library as “interesting”.

Now here comes the real scary part, Joe Hill saw this and sent me a private message online, which at first really freaked me out but after this initial shock had passed I found it really cool that Joe reaches out to his readers this way. It is always very scary when the fictional world collides with the real world in a sort of metaphysical way. It was like receiving my very own dead man’s suit by e-mail.

I of course replied to the message and hope to hear from Joe soon… now I just hope that I didn’t put some sort of curse on myself.