NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
My rating: 3 of 5 stars The World of Stuff and the World of Thought In the prologue of Joe Hill's NOS4A2 (2013), Charlie Manx, who looks like a bald, Keith Richards (only older), has apparently been lying comatose for a decade in a prison hospital since being convicted of abducting and killing dozens of kids in his Christmas-themed house of horrors, the Sleigh House, when he briefly wakes up in 2008, grabs the wrist of a nurse, and tells her that he has a place for her son in Christmasland, where all the children are safe in his head, and a place for her in the House of Sleep, courtesy of the Gasmask Man and his gingerbread smoke, and that all he needs is his ride, the Wraith. The novel itself begins in 1986, when eight-year-old Vic McQueen's first rides "between Lost and Found," pedaling her too big and too boyish Raleigh Tuff Burner bicycle through a condemned covered bridge called the Shorter Way into a different place several hours away from her hometown in order to find her mother's lost bracelet. The novel then sets the paths of Vic and Manx on a decades-long collision course in suspenseful, painful, humorous, and moving ways. The premise of the novel (as a few characters explain it) is that everybody lives in two worlds, the "real" world of stuff, facts, work, etc., and the "inscape" world of thought, emotion, and imagination, which are as powerful as gravity and as real as rocks. Furthermore, a small number of "strong creatives" (like Vic and Manx) are able to use special personal vehicles to move back and forth between their personal inscapes and the real world and or to bring elements from one into the other and or to shape reality like dough. Thus from when she was a girl Vic could ride her Tuff Burner through her personal bridge, coming out anywhere in America where she would find whatever she was looking for. Such "gifts" come with a cost. So using her imaginary but real bridge gives Vic terrible migraines centered in her left eye, messes with her mental equilibrium, and leads her right to Manx. Joe Hill writes vivid and imaginative descriptions, as when Vic first rides her Tuff Burner, and "It was like witchcraft; she could've been riding a broom, slicing effortlessly through Halloween darkness, a thousand feet off the ground"), and then first rides through the wood-slatted Shorter Way, "through stammering rays of white light. When she crossed through one of those wafer thin sheets of brightness, she felt it in her left eye, a kind of distant throb." He has a mind for how people hurt each other, as when Vic's father says to her mother during an argument, "Jesus. What an ugly fuckin' person you are inside. And I had a kid with you." He also has an ear for the witty line, as when Manx rhetorically asks, "Who do you think I am? Willy Wonka?" He writes flawed and human characters that make what happens easy to sympathize with. Vic can be unlikeable, denying the reality of her gift and hurting her parents, but she is also brave, strong, creative, and down to earth: a biker picture book maker mother. The supporting characters are neat: Lou Carmody, a "morbidly obese," gentle and innocent biker-mechanic fan of comic-books and Vic; Maggie, an elfin punk librarian whose gift is to find answers to questions by pulling Scrabble letter tiles out of a bag, the cost of which is a painful stammer (Hill under and poorly uses Maggie); and Bing Partridge, a childlike (in all the worst ways) middle-aged loser who murdered his abusive parents as a boy and becomes Manx' Renfield. And Charlie Manx is a fine villain. At once stupid and cunning, creepy and funny, sadistic and protective, he believes he's rescuing kids from abusive parents ("The fires of hell are not hot enough the man or woman who would hurt their children") and giving them endless fun without pain or sadness. NOS4A2 reminds me of the work of Hill's father Stephen King in novels like Doctor Sleep (the True Knot villains from that book are referred to here as being strong creatives like Vic and Manx). Like his father, Hill works into his novel many references to American popular culture (here from Sam Spade and Sponge Bob to Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and Ironman), as well as some to international high literature (here from Chekov to Borges). Like his father, Hill works into his novel relevant themes (here about parent-child relationships, childhood and adulthood, imagination and reality, and love) and writes suspenseful and brutal action scenes and brief moments of grace. Hill can do some bad writing, as when he cracks an excrescent joke about a young soldier, "Tom was well dead, not to mention well-done." He's also capable of going too far, as with some FBI machine guns. And there are multiple occasions when he contrives something against what we might expect characters to do given their personalities, situations, or gifts. An author shouldn't give his characters supernatural abilities and show them in action and then without a good explanation make them not work (or introduce new supernatural elements like ghosts) to generate suspense or complicate the plot. (view spoiler)[SPOILER SEQUENCE! Here are some examples of jarring contrivances: Manx conveniently interrupts Wayne's conversation with Vic before the boy can warn his mother about Maggie. At a key point Maggie fails to predict Wayne and Manx's arrival at her library when earlier in the novel she's been waiting for months for Vic to show up. Vic would be more alert for Wayne and Manx to visit Maggie, given that Manx and Bing have just kidnapped Vic's son and given that Maggie has just warned her that Manx was on the move. The ghost of Vic's mother starts appearing beside Wayne inside the Wraith to help him resist Manx' inscape spell by talking backwards; where this ghost or method of resistance suddenly came from I have no idea. A highly intelligent FBI agent wouldn't think that Vic's 12-year-old son would have given her the brutal (hammer shaped) bruises in her back while fighting against her attempts to kill him or kidnap him, and I suspect that a set of Rolls Royce tire tracks could not be seen as belonging to a Triumph motorcycle. If the FBI and police are so focused on Vic as suspect in her son's disappearance, they'd search her mother's house where she and Wayne have been living before going to a rented lake house, and would probably interview neighbors and discover the dead Dutch neighbors obviously not killed by Vic. Vic's Shorter Way has always taken her right where she is needing to go to find things, but at a key point it deposits her behind a burnt church blocking her view of Bing's house, so she mistakes her destination. (hide spoiler)] About the audiobook, listeners who prefer less dramatic readings might be put off by it being "PERFORMED by Kate Mulgrew." But I enjoyed her relishing the language and enhancing the story and making it more funny, scary, and moving. She revels in reading Charlie Manx, Bing, Lou ("Dude!"), sweet, stammering Maggie, and a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, "Kingfishers Catch Fire" (alas Hill abandons it). Hill closes the audiobook by reading an afterword in which he talks about the novel's themes (the loss of innocence and childhood magic and how hard it is to be a parent) and premise (everyone lives in the world of consensus reality and a world of personal fantasy), about how he naturally came to be a writer by growing up observing his father and mother, and about why he likes audiobooks. Fans of Joe Hill, Stephen King, or urban fantasy horror, as well as people who find Christmas creepy, would like this book. View all my reviews
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