[BOOKS OF THE DEAD] NOS4A2 - Joe Hill

NOS4A2 - Books of the Dead Review

Welcome to Books of the Dead. A monthly series by published author and founder of The Readers in the Rue Morgue Book Club Victoria Brown where she deep dives into some her favourite (and not so favourite) authors and books.

Author: Joe Hill

Publication Date: 30/05/2013

Synopsis: Victoria McQueen has a secret gift for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. On her Raleigh Tuff Burner bike, she makes her way to a rickety covered bridge that, within moments, takes her wherever she needs to go, whether it’s across Massachusetts or across the country. Charles Talent Manx has a way with children. He likes to take them for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the NOS4A2 vanity plate. With his old car, he can slip right out of the everyday world, and onto the hidden roads that transport them to an astonishing – and terrifying – playground of amusements he calls “Christmasland.” Then, one day, Vic goes looking for trouble—and finds Manx. That was a lifetime ago. Now Vic, the only kid to ever escape Manx’s unmitigated evil, is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx never stopped thinking about Victoria McQueen. He’s on the road again and he’s picked up a new passenger: Vic’s own son.

Thoughts:

‘NOS4A2’ (pronounced Nosferatu) may not be my favourite Joe Hill book – that is an ongoing battle between ‘Horns’ and ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ – but I think it’s the strongest out of all the Hill books I’ve read so far. It blends the anxiety-inducing Christmas, complete with dysfunctional family dynamics and nostalgia, with supernatural horror, psychology, and crime. 

The novel follows Victoria ‘Vic’ McQueen, a girl whose bicycle enables her to travel to different destinations whenever she desires to search for something. On her first outing she meets a mysterious man who shares her ability, Charlie Manx, who does not have a bicycle but a monstrous 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the vanity plate ‘NOS4R2’. And unlike Vic, he has one destination in mind – Christmasland, a seemingly wondrous place where Christmas is all year round and where only children can venture. But Christmasland is not what it seems. Picture ‘A Nightmare Before Christmas’, but made and controlled by Charles Manson, Dean Corll, or John Wayne Gacy. 

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‘NOS4A2’ explores Vic’s childhood and her troubled adolescence (her behaviour earned her the nickname ‘Brat’ from her father) where she tracks down Manx in his ‘Sleigh House’ (pun intended) and discovers his secret – he kidnaps young, abused children in a Peter Pan-esque fashion and feeds on their energy the way a vampire feeds on blood, turning them into sharp-teethed monsters who crave human flesh. Though she helps put Manx in prison, her adulthood is plagued by mental health issues from trying to convince herself that what she saw wasn’t real. She does, however, meet a lovable biker named Lou who rescued her from Manx’s clutches, and has a son with him. 

‘Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.’

Her path crosses with Manx once again when she starts receiving creepy phone calls from children in Christmasland (no-one believes her after she spent time in a mental institution) and discovers that Manx seems to be dead, but his body is missing. Vic knows better – she knows he’s coming for her and she’s ready. When her own son goes missing, she knows he’s been taken to Christmasland. The novel soon becomes a race against time to save Vic’s son from this vicious, child-molesting murderer and his gas mask wearing accomplice Bing Patridge (some Christmassy nods with the name there), who use a gingerbread-smelling gas to subdue their victims. 

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All the fun and spooky Christmas-schlock (and I say that lovingly; who doesn’t love creepy Christmas carols sung by cannibalistic children?) aside, what makes this book stronger than Hill’s previous works is the characters. Vic is sympathetic, strong, understandable and, most of all, believable. She messes up, a lot, but she is a fighter. Lou is a darling, Maggie Leigh, another person who shares Vic’s gift, is helpful and kind, and Manx is genuinely creepy. Like, gets under your skin creepy. While some readers have criticised the lack of background information on Manx, I feel like it’s not only intentional but far more impactful. We do not need to know the ins and outs of a villain’s’ backstory. If anything, the lack of understanding as to why he is the way he is makes him far more frightening. Michael Myers was much scarier in John Carpenter’s 1978 ‘Halloween’ than Rob Zombie’s 2007 version. 

Despite being a 700-page tome, I flew through this book. Hill has a wonderful way of holding your attention through every line, every interaction, every description, much in the way his father – old Stevie King, if you didn’t know – does. The pacing matches the speed of the character development (which is rare, usually one is sacrificed for the sake of the other) and the horror and violence never overshadows the plot. A truly fantastic read.

Verdict: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

-Victoria Brown, Author of The Death Ship: Recovering The Bodies of Titanic's Dead

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