Nos4a2

3.5/5 Scrabble Tiles

Nos4a2’s Vic McQueen has a very special bike. When she rides it through a rickety old tunnel, it takes her to anywhere she wants to go. She’s been able to use her bike to find things that her parent’s have misplaced. The process of traveling on her bike is exhausting though, and it takes a lot for her to keep her bike’s powers a secret.

One day, she rides her bike through the tunnel and finds something that will change the course of her life. She encounters Charles Talent Manx, a child abductor. She narrowly escapes his clutches, but the experience haunts her for the rest of her life. She receives eerie phone calls from Charles’ victims throughout her life, and no matter what extreme measures she goes to, the calls just won’t stop.

The only other person who she knows of who has experienced power similar to the bike’s is a woman named Maggie, but Maggie has magical Scrabble tiles.

Years later, Charles (who is eventually arrested and convicted of child abduction) dies…or does he? Vic swears that he has made a reappearance in her life, but why should she be believed? Charles is dead. And the dead don’t come back to life…right?

Despite Charles being a kidnapper and possibly a vampire, he isn’t the scariest character in the book. That role belongs to Bing Partridge, Charles’ right-hand man. Bing has the mental capacities of a child, but the gross and disturbing desires of a creepy adult. He uses sevoflurane, a gas that smells like gingerbread, to subdue Charles’ victims. The gingerbread smell is fitting, as Charles says he takes his victims to Christmasland, a magical place that’s definitely not creepy in any way.

Author Joe Hill’s descriptive language and disturbing imagery in the earlier parts of the book make it truly terrifying. Specifically, Charles kidnaps kids and then does something to their brains that makes them extremely chipper, which is somehow much more terrifying than if they tried to be creepy. (There’s one part where a creepy little kid repeatedly bashes his head against a glass door to try and break it, all with a smile on his face, and Hill’s vivid descriptions make it truly terrifying.) But many of those scares are earlier in the book, while the latter part of the book is more of a race-against-the-clock story and has very few scares. I think the book could’ve been shorter, only because I found myself constantly checking what percentage of the book I was at and how much time was left on the chapter. (I borrowed this ebook from the library and read it on my Kindle.)

Hill makes a lot of references to some horror favorites: Vic’s bike reminded me of Bill Denbrough and his bike, Charles has a car that reminded me of Christine, and Pennywise is explicitly mentioned in Nos4a2. While these references to his pop’s books are great, they felt like they were a distraction from the story Hill wanted to tell. (We don’t need to talk about how long it took for me to realize Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son.) Seeing Pennywise’s name just made me want to read It. These allusions take the reader out of the interesting story Hill was telling, and it forced my brain to compare Hill with his dad, which I don’t want to do! He is his own person and a talented author whose work should be evaluated independent of being the child of two popular novelists, but the allusions held him back.

Nos4a2 is such a unique take on the classic vampire story (something that’s truly hard to do), but the allusions and wordiness sometimes took away from an otherwise interesting, creepy, and compelling story.