Joe Hill

Joseph Hillström King (born June 4, 1972), better known by the pen name Joe Hill, is an American writer. His work includes the novels Heart-Shaped Box, Horns (2010), NOS4A2 (2013), The Fireman (2016) and King Sorrow (2025); the short story collections 20th Century Ghosts (2005) and Strange Weather (2017); and the comic book series Locke & Key (2008–2013). Hill has won numerous awards including Bram Stoker Awards, British Fantasy Awards, and an Eisner Award.

Early life Joe Hill was born in 1972 to authors Tabitha King (née Spruce) and Stephen King. He was born and grew up in Bangor, Maine. His younger brother Owen King is also a writer, and his older sibling Naomi King is a Unitarian minister.

At age nine, he appeared in the 1982 film Creepshow, directed by George A. Romero, which co-starred and was written by his father.

Career Hill chose to use an abbreviated form of his middle name for his professional surname in 1997, out of a desire to succeed based solely on his own merits rather than as the son of one of the world's best-selling and most-recognized living novelists. After achieving a degree of independent success, Hill publicly confirmed his identity in 2007, the year his first novel came out, after an article the previous year in Variety reported his identity.

Hill is a recipient of the Ray Bradbury Fellowship. and the 2006 World Fantasy Award—Novella for "Voluntary Committal". His stories have appeared in a variety of magazines, such as Subterranean Magazine, Postscripts and The High Plains Literary Review, and in many anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (ed. Stephen Jones) and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (ed. Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant).

Hill's first book, the limited edition collection 20th Century Ghosts (published in 2005 by PS Publishing), showcases fourteen of his short stories and won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection, In September, 2007, at the thirty-first Fantasycon, the British Fantasy Society awarded Hill the first ever Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer Award. A collection of the series in limited form from Subterranean Press sold out within 24 hours of being announced.

Hill's second novel, Horns, was published in February 2010. A film based on the novel was released in 2014, directed by Alexandre Aja and starring Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple. NOS4A2, his third novel, was published in April 2013. The novel peaked at number five on the New York Times Best Seller list. Hill's fourth novel, The Fireman, was released in May 2016. It entered the New York Times Best Seller list at number one, making it his highest-ranked novel.

In 2019, In the Tall Grass, co-written with his father Stephen King, was released as a Netflix Original film. Filming for the Locke & Key TV series, also by Netflix, began in the middle of January 2019 and the first season aired in February 2020. AMC began broadcasting a TV series of NOS4A2 in July 2019. The first season of Creepshow, released in September 2019, featured an adaptation of Hill's short story "By the Silver Waters of Lake Champlain".

Following DC Comics's announcement in June 2019 that it would suspend publication of its Vertigo Comics imprint, they announced that Hill would oversee and share the writing for a new horror line, Hill House Comics. which Hill had begun discussing with editor Mark Doyle in 2017. The line was originally to be titled Vertigo Fall, then Joe Hill's Vertigo Fall, before being given its eventual name.

Among Hill's unpublished works is one partly completed story with his father ("But Only Darkness Loves Me"), which is held with the Stephen King papers at the Special Collections Unit of the Raymond H Fogler Library at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine.

Personal life

In 1999, Joe Hill married Leanora Legrand, whom he met at Vassar College. They have three children. The couple divorced in 2010.

In 2018, he married British publisher Gillian Redfearn. Their twins were born in 2022.

Awards