"Horns" by Joe Hill Trivia Quiz

Answer: They cause people to reveal their inner base desires.

Ignatius Perrish is born into a rich family; his father is a musician and his brother is a TV host. However, he is struggling to cope a year on from his girlfriend Merrin's murder. One morning after waking with a hangover, he discovers the beginnings of horns growing from his head and becomes very confused when the woman he is living with, Glenna, doesn't seem to notice, and instead becomes very frank with him, saying things that people usually keep to themselves.

He discovers that whenever he encounters someone, they reveal their desires, for example the receptionist who would like to chew out the mother of a screaming child, or the priest who tells Ig that the best thing would be for him to kill himself. Ig also discovers that if he touches a person, he suddenly knows much of their lives.

Answer: A cross necklace

Ig first catches sight of Merrin in church, when she purposely catches the light on her cross necklace to shine into his eyes, in a Morse code message. However, this time he doesn't manage to speak to her, but when he goes to her pew at the end of the service, he finds that she has left the broken necklace on the pew.

He had seen a blond boy, whom he nicknamed Caesar, trying to fasten it around Merrin's neck, to her annoyance. Caesar turns out to be Lee Tourneau, whom Ig meets after an accident that caused him to fall in the river; he believes that Lee saved his life by getting him to breathe again, and when they are in Ig's house, Lee finds Merrin's necklace and offers to fix it for Ig.

Answer: Ig's friend Lee Tourneau

Ig was planning to use the necklace as a way to speak to Merrin, and so is dismayed when Lee, after offering to fix it, suggests that he himself will use it as "a nice in" with Merrin. However, on the day Lee is supposed to return it to Merrin, Ig finds Lee wearing it himself. Ig trades Lee with a cherry bomb for the necklace and as planned, he uses it to meet her and they start a relationship.

Throughout the years, unbeknownst to Ig, Lee has fallen in love with Merrin. When the couple breaks up, Lee believes that she loves him back and will start a relationship with him. He appears to take the rejection not too badly, but when he picks Merrin up when she is drunk, under the guise of helping her into fresh clothes after she vomits in the woods, he bludgeons her head with a rock and, while she is still alive, rapes her.

Answer: False

Actually, Merrin is the one who decides to end it. Because she and Ig have been together since a young age, she feels that perhaps she's missed out on the opportunity to have other relationships and see what other men are like. Before Ig leaves for his new job in England, she decides to suggest they go on a break and see other people. She believes it's for Ig's benefit as well, so that he doesn't have to resist the temptation of other women while away in England.

Of course this erupts into an argument, with Ig extremely upset and Merrin insisting that they can't go their whole lives only having had a relationship and sex with the one person. They are thrown out of the restaurant, and Ig speeds away, leaving Merrin stranded in the pouring rain. However, this decision contributes to her death as it is her murderer who picks her up to take her home.

Answer: His brother Terry

Everyone in town blames Ig for Merrin's murder, but he himself has no idea who the perpetrator truly was. Although his parents give him advice to protect him during the investigation, he realizes that they believe he did do it.

When Ig returns to his parents' house with the horns, his mother admits she wishes he was not her child, that he would just leave forever and she wouldn't have to hear any of his problems. His father has already confessed that he arranged for the forensic lab to go on fire, believing that Ig was guilty and that this would exonerate him, or at least not implicate him. However, as Ig wasn't guilty, all this achieved was to destroy the evidence that would find the real killer. Ig decides that he does not want to bump into his brother Terry, who is visiting, although he believes that any secret Terry has could not possibly hurt him as much as those of his parents.

However, one of Terry's first sentences is "If I had any idea Lee Tourneau was going to kill her, I would've tried to stop it", and Ig's world collapses yet again. It transpires that when Lee picked Merrin up, Terry was in the back seat in a drugged stupor after a night out and hadn't quite realized what was happening until the deed was done. He had no part in it, but he was involved in hiding the evidence.

Answer: Stick needles in her feet

It is implied that Lee became some kind of sociopath after a childhood accident. He was walking along a fence trying to entice a stray cat when he fell and landed headfirst on a pitchfork, whose tine went deep into his brain. His parents did not realize the wound had occurred and he didn't realize the extent of it, thus he received no medical treatment.

Lee's mother is in the last stages of dementia, and he is her "carer". He spends the days tormenting her cruelly. In spite of the high summer temperatures, he leaves thick blankets on top of her and turns off the air conditioning and fans, leaving her to slowly roast and unable to help herself, while he strolls naked, barely able to take the heat himself. He ignores her cries of "Thirsty!", instead bringing through an enticing cup of water and drinking it in front of her, not giving her a sip. Whenever she wets herself, he doesn't hurry to change the sheets, and at one point rubs the urine-soaked sheets in her face and tells the dehydrated woman to drink that instead.

During a lucid moment before her death, his mother tells him that he isn't Lee, that her son is still walking on the fence, i.e. before his brain injury changed his personality. She says he has "no packaging", that he is empty inside. She clings on for several months under her son's cruelty before finally dying and finding peace.

Answer: Mary

When Ig's car is unearthed from the river, Merrin's father Dale is there to watch, hoping for confirmation that the man he believes to be his daughter's killer is dead. Under the influence of the horns, he drives Ig to his house and they talk about what happened to Merrin. Dale admits that when he saw Ig's car in the river and thought him dead, he felt sorry that he hadn't killed him himself.

His wife's way of coping with Merrin's death was to erase every trace of her in their home. She has replaced the photos with those of Jesus Christ. They have drifted apart in their grief, and Dale confesses that he was too afraid to shoot Ig, and instead put his gun in his mouth in a bid to kill himself, but again was too afraid to. He is still suicidal as he talks about his "Mary", but Ig uses the horns to talk him out of suicide.

Answer: Snakes

Ig is very frightened when the first snake appears in the foundry, where Merrin died and a place he frequently visits. As he is trying to handle it to take it away, he notices that suddenly there are tens more of them. As more and more approach, he throws a whiskey bottle at them, succeeding in dispersing most of them; however, some don't go far.

When he wakes up hours later, he hears screams, and ventures out to find a group of bullies tormenting a boy. They decapitate a snake and try to force the boy to drink its blood. After Ig intervenes and chases them away, he tenderly takes the body of the snake back to the foundry and buries it. The foundry becomes Ig's base of operations, and the snakes increase in number as time goes on. Ig even delivers a type of sermon to them about God and the Devil.

Answer: True

Ig's girlfriend Glenna has been worried about him, as he has been missing since the influence of the horns caused to her to admit that she had cheated on him with Lee. She ventures out to the foundry and finds him there; he convinces her to leave town and him behind and see New York City, as she has always wanted. After she leaves, Ig finds the phone she's left behind, with a text from Lee; the horns allowing him to accurately impersonate Glenna's voice, he calls and tells Lee that "Glenna" is stuck at the foundry, having twisted her ankle.

Having spoken to the real Glenna, who has no idea what he's talking about, Lee realizes that it's a possible trap. When he arrives, he sends Eric, who was Terry's friend in childhood, in to look for Glenna. He tries to shoot Ig, who spears him in the shoulder with a pitchfork. Lee, not caring whether he hits Eric or not, shoots at both of them to hit Ig. When he gets close enough, Ig wrestles the gun from him using the pitchfork, and it goes off in midair, hitting Eric in the face and killing him.

Ig and Lee continue to fight, and it ends with Ig goring Lee with his horns. A snake crawls past at that moment, looking for somewhere dark and warm, and Ig uses the power of the horns to inspire the snake to make its home in Lee; the snake enters his mouth and chokes him. Ig feels sorry for the snake, having to die "stuck inside Lee Tourneau".

Answer: True

After Merrin's father drove Ig to his house to talk about her, Ig wanders off and looks through her things. Among her notes, he finds an envelope covered in Morse code. Thinking of their first encounter, with Merrin signing Morse code with her necklace, he opens it and finds a mammogram, along with a notebook whose pages are full of Morse code too.

The notebook contains a message that she wrote, slowly but surely, during her cancer treatment, in which she explains that her sister Regan's cancer was genetic, and that she, Merrin, has the same type. She says that she doesn't want to get to the point her sister did, and become horrible and cruel to her loved ones as Regan did at the end, in a lot of pain. She explains that the cancer was the reason she was going to break it off with him, so that he could move on and find someone else without having to witness her decline. Ig feels guilty that she didn't confide in him, as it may well have prevented Lee from having the opportunity to assault and murder her.