A few weeks ago I made a post on Facebook asking for recommendations for really scary books. I wanted to be scared. I wanted that uncomfortable, creeped-out feeling. I wanted to have trouble sleeping because my mind wouldn’t let go of something I read.
Several people recommended NOS4A2 by Joe Hill. I checked out the book. I noticed it had a lot of high star ratings on Amazon and Goodreads. I figured I’d give it a shot.
I seldom regret spending money on books, but I regret that I didn’t check to see if this was available as a Prime Loan. It takes half the book (literally the first 50% of the book, according to Kindle) for anything to happen. At the start it feels more like a collection of short stories that are (seemingly) unconnected; we always seem to find the character doing something like staring out the window or riding a bike, waiting for something to happen and remembering things. There’s a lot of things like “It had been unbearably hot and thundery the day the nail gun went off (that was how he thought of it — not as the day he shot his father but as the day the gun went off).” That feels an awful lot like “telling” instead of “showing” and it seems to happen a lot.
The sly references to Stephen King’s works were cute at first, but got annoying as they went on. It makes you realize that this book isn’t its own thing. It’s The Shining and Christine and Firestarter and The Talisman and It and a few others mixed in. It’s predictable. There’s a few really, genuinely likable characters. Don’t get attached to them. There’s a dog. Bye-bye doggie. It’s really hard to be scared by a book when you can see everything coming from miles away. “Hey, we’re going to tell you about thirty times that this stuff is explosive, right. Oh, and by the way, HERE’S A SCENE THAT REVOLVES AROUND A LIGHTER. REMEMBER THIS LIGHTER AND THE EXPLOSIVE STUFF, OK?”
Call me crazy, but I like my foreshadowing to be a little more subtle. I want to feel rewarded for guessing right.
Lastly, and this is really stupid, I couldn’t stop picturing Monty Burns as Charlie Manx, which completely eliminated anything scary or creepy that might have remained.
“In spite of his large skull, his features were weasel-like and crowded close together in the center of his face. He had a sunken chin and an overbite, which gave him a very dim, almost feeble look.”
I’m giving it two stars because it’s passable and Joe Hill isn’t a BAD writer. This book is just not great.
Edited 1 April, 2014:
Despite thinking about this for about a week before writing this review, it finally struck me today what’s lacking in this book: there’s no real threat. Manx kidnaps kids and gets his henchman to murder the parent. Manx believes that he’s saving the kids from potentially miserable childhoods. Maybe he actually is. That’s part of the problem — it’s never clear if the kids really do have bad lives at home and really will fall victim to their parent(s) ways, or if Manx is justifying his abductions.
Either way, what happens is the kids are taken to Christmasland where they stay kids. Every day is Christmas. There’s rides and candy and presents and ok, sure, the kids get a little demonic, but from what we can tell, they might only be that way in the present of an outsider that threatens their world. When there isn’t someone trying to destroy their place, maybe they’re different. Maybe they’re living perfectly happy lives in the holiday version of Neverland. They don’t age. They’re happy. They play games and make friends. The’re innocent (in that disturbing “pull the wings off a butterfly because you’re too stupid to know it’s cruel” way).
The parents that are taken do suffer. They’re tortured and assaulted before they’re murdered. But that all happens “off screen”. We don’t get their terror.
I think why this book didn’t work for me is because I’m not a parent. It seems like really the biggest “horror” going on is Manx takes kids and that’s a terrifying thing to think about if you have kids. But in his own weird way he loves them. He cares for them. They get a little savage, but they’re contained. It’s not like he sends them out into the world to maul and pillage.
I suppose if I had a kid I would be worried about it getting abducted and disappearing forever — never knowing what happened to it would be terrible. As it’s laid out in this book, though, there’s nothing scary about it.
I really liked his other two novels, but this one seemed too derivative of his father, which I found disappointing after the other more original novels. Small references are enjoyable, such as the fact that he makes a comment about the True Knot, the villain’s of Doctor Sleep (and that novel mentions Charlie Manx) but this was too much. Also, I really wanted a straight up vampire story with Hill’s spin.
I think if this had been his first book I would have been more OK with the references. Maybe this is actually the first thing he wrote, but other books were published first while he finished this one up? I don’t know.
I do know it’s not going to put me off reading his other books. I read some of the one and two star reviews after I finished the book and many of them say that this one was a letdown after his earlier stuff.
I wanted a real vampire story, too. Or at least something a little less hashed.