NOS4A2 (Joe Hill)

NOS4A2
Joe Hill
William Morrow
Fiction, Horror
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Victoria McQueen, better known as Vic (or "the brat"), had one escape from her rough childhood and unhappy parents, on the wheels of her bicycle through the woods and down to the old covered bridge... a bridge that has a way of taking her where she needs to be to find things that have been lost. As she grows up, she tries to dismiss the bridge as a childhood fantasy - until she runs out of her home as a teen and straight across the bridge to the lair of serial child killer Charlie Manx.
Manx is no ordinary killer. With his classic Rolls Royce Wraith, one of only a handful in America, he prowls the country in search of children to "rescue" from unhappy homes. Like Vic, he can navigate roads that don't exist in normal space and time, through the "inscapes" of imagination - but his lead somewhere far less wholesome than a covered bridge. His lead to Christmasland, a throwback amusement park inside his own imagination, where his victims live on as monstrous wraiths stripped of their humanity. When he meets Vic, he recognizes another "creative", one who can change reality with the force of their imaginaton and will... but Vic is a mentally fragile girl, growing into a damaged woman, while Manx is an old pro. When she escapes and Manx is finally arrested, his reign of terror should be over. Instead, it's just beginning - and only Vic can stop him.

REVIEW: Having enjoyed Heart-Shaped Box, I thought I'd give another Joe Hill book a try. He presents some interesting and inherently chilling concepts in the "inscapes" and Christmasland, though they ultimately would be cheap cardboard props without the characters who bring them to life. Everyone in the story is damaged in some way, physically or mentally or emotionally (or multiple choice), and most are trying - if often failing - to do best with the imperfect tools and worldview they have. Even Manx has rationalized his monstrous predation on children, and his henchman and protege, a child-minded serial rapist named Bing, was broken long before he got in touch with the man behind the wheel of the Wraith. Vic is particularly shattered, first by being the product of a dysfunctional marriage and later by her own choices and struggles over the existence of the bridge. She often seemed undercut as a heroine, though, repeatedly dismissing her own experiences as delusions only to repeatedly be devastated to discover that the covered bridge is real - as is the danger of Charlie Manx. When Vic has a child of her own, she learns some of what her own parents went through, and even as she tries to keep her son from feeling as lost and often rejected as she herself felt, she seems doomed to fail. The horror elements build nicely throughout the tale, with several scary and gruesome moments (and more than one Easter egg nod to his own works and his father Stephen King's creations), though once in a while it feels a slight bit drawn out, like it could've lost a few chapters in revision. For the most part, though, I enjoyed it, and expect I'll be reading (or listening, rather, as this was another audiobook) to more of Hill's works in the future.

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