Anybody who says that writers are born, not made, doesn't know Joe Hill. The most important thing this fast-emerging master of the horror genre learned from his fortunate birth - he is the son of horror sovereign Stephen King and his novelist wife, Tabitha - was that he had to make it on his own.
Fearing he could write "something mediocre" that a publisher might accept "just to make a quick buck on the last name," Joseph Hillstrom King dropped the offending marker and set out boldly into the wilderness awaiting most young writers, accumulating drawers full of unpublished manuscripts and the accompanying rejection letters.
The thoroughgoing rejection of what he then considered to be his magnum opus, a 1,000-page novel called The Fear Tree, was "devastating" at the time, admits Hill, now 38 and the father of three boys. "But looking back now, I see that as a case of the pen name doing its job," he says - forcing him to learn a difficult craft through the time-honoured method of trial and error.
When Hill finally did manage to sell a novel, neither his agent nor his publisher knew who he really was. But their thinking was sound: The book, Heart-Shaped Box, proved to be a tremendous success, climbing to No. 8 on The New York Times bestseller list in the summer of 2007 strictly on its own merits.
With his second novel, Horns, now following a similar trajectory, the pen name has completed its job. "In retrospect," Hill says, now happy to be known as a chip off a monumentally successful literary block, starting out anonymously "was the smartest thing I've ever done professionally."
Horns has all the makings of a horror classic, opening with its ambiguous hero discovering a pair of devil horns growing out of his forehead after a night of drunken debauchery. The horns have power to bring out the worst in people, which they do to grim effect throughout the book, ultimately enabling the devil who wears them to wreak spectacular revenge on his tormentors in the small New England town that hates him for a crime he didn't commit - and to reveal himself as the one true hero of the lot.
The book is fast-paced, well-made and wonderfully weird - a "fresh, tough-minded take on what it means to make a deal with the devil and your own worst nature," according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Last week it appeared as No. 10 on The New York Times list of best-selling hardcover fiction.
Even so, says Hill, ever the improving journeyman, the first draft of his second book was "not a very pretty thing." Making it was a struggle, and the result was inadequate. But having grown up amid the incessant tap-tap-tapping of parental keyboards, he knew just what to do about that.
"That's when you have to remind yourself it's a job," he says. "It doesn't matter if it's fun, you have to put in the hours. So I ground away and eventually all the parts seemed to come together."
Neither the success of his first novel nor his own famous name helped to shape Horns. "I was fighting every step of the way but I'm very proud of the way it came out," Hill says. "I think it's a fun read."
Learning every lesson of the family business the hard way, Hill has developed strong theories about what works and doesn't work in a contemporary novel.
"More than ever I think it's really important in a story to keep the gas pedal mashed right to the floor," he says. Characterization matters, themes count. "But the first priority is to keep people turning the pages."
That's not easy to do in the age of YouTube, according to Hill. "We're the most over-entertained people in the history of the world," he says, "and fighting for people's attention is a cage match."
Hill learned the rudiments of that art in the most traditional of settings. "After dinner, we would all go into the living room and pass a book around and read stories to one another," he says. "That all sounds very Victorian, more like 1896 than 1986, but it was good. It was very satisfying. We all loved books."
One result is that two of King's three children - Hill and his younger brother, Owen King - are professional writers.
"For most beginning writers, just the thought of sitting alone in a room every day is a challenge," he says. "Writing is hard. There's a lot to learn. It's a difficult craft to get."
But Hill never questioned the value of such hard, lonely work, "because when I came home from school my mum would be in her office banging away at the keys and my dad would be in his office banging away at the keys.
"It just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to go sit by yourself and play make-believe," he added. His parents were "concrete proof" that the effort was serious and the eventual rewards were real.
It was the example, not the name, that made Joe King a writer - a worthy successor to his father, popular in his own right and entirely self-made.