Tough to answer though, it's Joes baby all the way. I'm glad I didn't know he was Kings kid before I read it. I would have been looking for papas influence all the way and it was good to read it and appreciate it on its own merits.
I'd have to go back a long ways to find something King wrote to compare it to because he's been out of the scarethebejesus out of ya business for some time. The Shining was the single most frightening thing I ever read by King, closely followed by a short story called The Raft. I read the former when I was in my teens, the latter in my early 20's. My perspective is considerably diferent now and you have to remember that King was a bit of a pioneer in lending a populist voice to horror fiction.
Thusly even Heart Shaped Box wasn't as tittilating as it may have been when I was 19. Pound for pound, it rivals The Shining but instead of trying to swallow my sickup while reading it, I was just setting the book down more frequently. Aging gracefully here.
As a novel, it doesn't resemble any of Kings books. What it does have is the marvelous populist voice that made so many of his dads works just a whole bunch of fun to read. Given the legacy Hill had to avoid being compared to, I'm even more impressed that he was able to churn out something so wonderfully and uniqely his.