HEART SHAPED BOX by Joe Hill. Various editions.

Was reading this, liked the writing but some of my sense and sensibilities were triggered by a line that read "...the ten minutes it take to get out of Delaware..."

This is wrong. It does not take ten minutes to breeze your way through Delaware. Any which way you go through Delaware you have traffic lights, toll booths, auto accidents, the police, prostitutes, drunks walking in the road, Nascar fans, deer, groundhogs, low flying vultures, bike riders, kids, motorcycles, potholes, skaters and local politicians.

So this dude named Jude, who is a heavily metal rockstar of some noteriety, buys a ghost off the internet and it plans to kill him. He heads down south to save himself.

As mentioned, the writing is good, but the skin of a 55 year old world weary man is not worn very well by a 25 year old writer who has lived a somewhat stable life being the son of Stephen King. The plotting is good as well. The emotional substance just doesn't translate well.

Maybe with the next novel he'll get closer to his own life.