Do we like Joe Hill?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy found in his words, acts or company, but the record of active good is lighter than we'd like.
Joe Hill is Joseph Hillstrom King, the eldest son of Stephen and Tabitha King, raised in Maine in a house where novels and publishing were dinner-table talk. He started writing stories around twelve and, as a teenager, sent his dad pages to be edited, which taught him about rewriting.
The formative bit is the pen name. He kept his famous father out of it for his first decade as a writer, collecting rejections in his twenties and piling up more than twenty short stories and a few awards before a 2007 magazine article revealed the link. He wanted to be judged on his own work, and by the time Heart-Shaped Box hit the bestseller lists, he had been.
The harm check came up clean, and we looked properly. Searches on trans and LGBTQ+ people, women, vaccines, climate, immigrants and politics turned up nothing from him: no grievance posting, no conspiracy theories, no culture-war grift. That's an honest gap as much as a pass, because he isn't a loud political commentator.
The company he keeps is clean too. His recent big screen work is The Black Phone sequel, where his pitch convinced director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill to come back, and he has also talked about adapting his own unpublished novella for film. Nothing there leans on anyone with a record of pushing harm.
On the good-person side, we found no lawsuits, no court cases and no allegations against the novelist (a pile of results are about the executed labour organiser of the same name, a different Joe Hill). He openly credits his dad and his influences, saying “You can't escape your influences, so you might as well own them.” He's also done collaborations with his father, calling storytelling the family's shared language.
The recent news is about books, not scandal. His novel King Sorrow came out in 2025 to good reviews, and a National Writers Series interview recorded in November 2025 ran in January 2026 as that series' 300th author. A new novel, Hunger, is listed for release, though dates differ by market, so check your bookshop.