Like father, like son

I mentioned in my review of Horns last year that if I had Stephen King for a father, I wouldn’t have been a writer for love nor money. The shadow he casts is impressive, to say the least (and Mr Mercedes is imminent, about which I am very excited). So if it were me, the prospect would have been too daunting to undertake. But Hill dropped his family name and tried for as long as possible to keep his origins out of the press. It wasn’t that long, since he basically looks EXACTLY LIKE HIS DAD. And it turns out, with this creepy epic, that the family resemblance doesn’t stop there.

The A of the US title has been swapped for an R here in the UK (presumably in the US it really is pronounced Nosfer-ay-tu) but that is by the by. Victoria McQueen, aka “The Brat”, discovers one summer that she has a special talent. If she needs to find something, all she has to do is cross the Shorter Way Bridge and she finds it. Never mind that the Bridge was torn down years before and that bridges can’t move. Whenever she needs it, the Bridge is there. But then her “gift” causes her to cross paths with the hideously evil child murder, Charles Talent Manx.  She becomes the only child to ever escape him and he ends up in prison. The rest of the children Manx took are trapped forever in Christmasland, where it’s Christmas every day, but nobody is having any fun.

I really struggled to sum up the plot of this one, as you can probably tell. Not only is it epic and sprawling, it is also twisted and evil. In the best ways. Hill takes his time to set things up, creating fully rounded characters for us to care about as he does so. And then he pulls the rug and puts the reader into a full tilt thriller that manages to be both chilling and hugely exciting at the same time. The section where Vic encounters Manx for the first time and escapes him is up there in terms of making your palms sweat with anxiety with the breakout sequence in Emma Donoghue’s Room. 

The chilling and the creepiness isn’t retained to the supernatural elements of the book either. With Bing Partridge, Manx’s educationally subnormal and increasingly unhinged helper, Hill has given us one of the most memorably unpleasant characters in recent years. Between him and Manx and the horrors of Christmasland, I would recommend reading this book in broad daylight. And you’ll probably feel like you need to take a shower afterwards. Believe it or not, that is really high praise. Oh and special mention for the brief mention of the True Knot, a neat little crossover from Doctor Sleep. King is forever self-referencing (the pinnacle of which has to be 11.22.63), and now Hill seems to be blending his and his father’s fictional worlds, so in about five books time, it will all be so meta my brain may well implode.