He balances “Heart-Shaped Box” between reality and fantasy in ways that threaten to run the book into an uncharted dreamscape, and away from the palpable suspense on which it thrives. Hill, whose British short story collection “20th Century Ghosts” attracted favorable attention (but not an American publisher), has set himself a tricky job here. And everyone is seeking either redemption or revenge. Everyone in the book is wrestling with some kind of murderous ghost. Jude was Justin Cowzynski in those days, but everyone in “Heart-Shaped Box” has picked up an alias of some kind.

The ghostly old man is Anna’s stepfather, and he also overlaps with another character: Jude’s father, a monstrous, now-feeble figure who lies near death at Jude’s childhood home in Louisiana. He knew she was “not fashionably depressed, in the way of some Goth chicks, but clinically.” Opinions differ as to whether Jude bears some blame for her suicide. In his passive way Jude sensed that Anna was in trouble without caring to do much about it. (Georgia is his current companion.) Florida and Georgia - or Anna and Marybeth, as they turn out to be named - begin to meld together as the story proceeds, even though Anna is dead, with the aid of one hair-raising Ouija board scene. Hill has built a revenge plot around the suit, linking it to Jude’s treatment of the old girlfriend he called Florida, because he likes nicknaming groupies for the states from which they came. He can’t be sure where reality ends and fantasy begins. What separates this haunting from the hollow, arbitrary kind is that Jude has made his living exploiting just this sort of phenomenon.

The suit - which of course looks like Johnny Cash’s - begins showing up in unexpected places. Jude is 54, out to pasture, coasting on the royalties from old albums with names like “Happy Little Lynch Mob” and basically a fraud. That’s a thought that would bring a smile to the Goth face of Judas Coyne, the book’s main character. “Heart-Shaped Box,” which takes its title from a Nirvana song, is a Valentine from hell. (His full name is Joseph Hillstrom King.) Hill’s work to Stephen King’s if Stephen King were not his actual father. In a book much too smart to sound like the work of a neophyte, he builds character invitingly and plants an otherworldly surprise around every corner. Hill uses them to shockingly good effect, creating a wild, mesmerizing, perversely witty tale of horror. These are the bare bones of “Heart-Shaped Box” - literally, since the ghost is a skeletal old man. The ghost would rather go marauding through the rock star’s life than be part of his creepy little museum. The suit agrees, but for all the wrong reasons. He thinks it will be perfect for his ghoulish-artifact collection. The plot of Joe Hill’s first novel can be summarized simply: An aging heavy-metal star buys a haunted suit over the Internet.

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