Who Wrote It?
NOS4A2 is Joe Hill’s third novel.
First paragraph
“Nurse Thornton dropped into the long-term-care ward a little before eight with a hot bag of blood for Charlie Manx.”
What’s It About?
This is a story about how need, imagination, and circumstance can create individual realities. It’s also a story of resilience and love.
Vic McQueen lives in a dysfunctional household. Her parents argue a lot and her father sometimes ends those arguments using his fists.
She discovers that her bike allows her to cross an old, covered bridge that doesn’t actually exist anymore in the real world. It takes her to places related to what she’s thinking about at the time she enters it. For example, the first time she crosses it, her parents have been arguing about her mother’s lost bracelet. The bridge takes Vic back to the lake where the bracelet was lost so Vic can find it and bring it back.
On one of her trips, she meets Maggie, a Scrabble-playing librarian. Maggie explains how strong creative people can move between the real world and their own internal world. But this ability always has a cost.
“Strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.”
Maggie warns Vic to stay away from ‘the Wraith’. She doesn’t know much about him, only that he’s an old man with an old car that he uses to take children and feed off them. Manx takes the children to Christmasland where every day is Christmas and no one has to worry about anything.
Vic’s father leaves and she becomes a teenage delinquent who tries not to believe that her bridge is/was real. One day she rides out on her bike looking for trouble and the bridge takes her to Charlie Manx. She has a narrow escape and Manx ends up in prison.
As Vic grows up, she becomes increasingly mentally unstable, especially when she starts getting phone calls from children Manx has abducted.
“The first time Vic McQueen took a long-distance phone call from Christmasland, she was an unwed mother, living with her boyfriend in a double-wide, and it was snowing in Colorado.”
Around fifteen years later, Manx ‘dies’, but that doesn’t stop him from coming after Vic’s teenage son. Manx is determined to wreak his vengeance on Vic but he underestimates her sheer bloody-mindedness and determination to protect her family from this monster.
“She sensed the children creeping in around her, with their chains and hatchets and knives and necklaces of severed thumbs.”
What Should You Expect?
- Expect an interesting concept and a story that moves along at a nice pace.
- Expect an extremely misogynistic villain and a very disturbing henchman who’s obsessed with a WW2 gas mask. There’s something particularly creepy about people who wear gas masks.
- Expect to be mildly annoyed, especially near the start of the book, when the main character is referred to as ‘the Brat’, ‘Vic’, ‘Vicki’, or ‘Victoria’. Please, pick a name and stick with it.
- Expect to not have built much of a connection to Wayne, Vic’s son, by the time Manx takes him. We know next to nothing about him and haven’t had the chance to really care about him by the time he’s important to the story.
- Expect a lot of adverbs.
- Expect a touch of overwriting at times. Some things could have been said with way less words. Maybe a slightly tighter edit would have helped.
- Expect a relatively quick but satisfactory resolution.
- Expect to view Christmas differently by the end, especially if you were really into Christmas at the start.
Should You Read It?
Yes.
Give it a go if you like Stephen-King-like psychological mixed with supernatural thrillers.
This story has also been adapted into a TV series.
