One of the fun things about reading a lot of horror novels is watching the faces of your more well-adjusted friends as you explain, straight-faced, the premise of a book you just enjoyed. When I say that I just finished a great book about a vampire Rolls-Royce Wraith that sucks the life out of children and keeps them trapped forever in a Christmas-themed fantasy world, responses range from polite disinterest to something like self-righteous indignation (the latter reaction generally coming from friends that would list Ulysses as a favorite novel). When I explain this to a horror fan, though, I anticipate a slight widening of the eyes, and an enthusiastic response -- possibly followed by a trip to Wikipedia.
This is not because the people that read horror novels are idiots or have low standards. Quite the opposite -- it's because we know that good writing -- the gift of storytelling, the gift of execution -- can override a ridiculous sounding premise, and we take immense joy in seeing this being done successfully. There's almost a sense of rebellion in this process -- take that, Flaubert! -- and a great deal of fun. And I imagine that Joe Hill had quite a bit of fun while writing this monster of a novel. He overcomes the relative weakness of a far fetched plot idea by making great use of his strengths: a natural gift for characterization and a large, welcoming imagination that birthed an interesting new mythos. Taken as a whole, it feels as if we are witnessing something very exciting: a writer growing in confidence, skill, and discovering his own unique voice to craft what is rightfully being called a breakout novel.
It is difficult to build a memorable horror villain while attempting to put a fresh spin on genre tropes, but Hill manages to create a new and refreshingly modern take on the vampire with Charles Manx. Although Manx is occasionally played too comically for my tastes -- he is firmly in the genteel and polite vampire group -- he is given a great minion in Bing Partridge, the "Gasmask Man". Dracula and Renfield are referenced directly in the novel, and as The Count himself was sometimes a bit too polite and Stoker used Renfield for some visceral brutality, so too does Hill play off this dynamic with Manx and Bing to good effect. Manx is a character that honestly believes he is acting for the benefit of those he is "saving", and Bing's unquestioning devotion to him and how the desperation for simplicity and nostalgia can fester in a weak and feeble mind was also interesting (and applicable to much of what I observe on the internet). Their motivations make sense. It doesn't aim for a complete genre reinvention in the way of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, but it is a very welcome and refreshing take on a monster that has recently been so softened and anesthetized.
Manx is able to use his Wraith to access and navigate a sort of shared "inscape" -- a roadmap of the mental realm that is part collective unconscious and part personal dream -- or, in Manx's case, nightmare. Manx at first, on the surface, seems completely at home and unaffected by the act of shifting between worlds, and seems to have mastered it while others struggle to understand it.
And this brings me to the true strength of this novel: its protagonist, Victoria McQueen ("The Brat" to her dad, "Vic" to the rest of the world, and us). We first meet Vic as a child, and at first this set off a warning alarm in my mind -- I absolutely despise the use of children in horror fiction. Somehow, though, Joe Hill managed to do the impossible and made me not only tolerate, but actively love the kid, and he deserves high praise for this fact alone. Vic starts off as a normal enough girl of eight -- a little wild, a gifted artist, but otherwise fairly unremarkable. I particularly enjoyed that he didn't attempt to make her into a precocious genius, the most insufferable kind of child to spend time with in a long book. One day while fleeing a parental dispute over a missing bracelet, she accidentally discovers her own ride into the inscape -- her beloved Raleigh bike, which allows her to access a sort of memory of a condemned and torn down covered bridge which takes her to find missing things. Sort of a deranged Bridge of Terabithia.
Again, if this sounds kind of ridiculous, just trust me on this: it isn't. Some of the book's best writing comes from Vic's increasing disbelief in the possibility of what she is doing -- as she gets older, it gets harder and harder for her to accept the reality of the bridge, and this struggle begins to destroy her. Even in "happy" books, there's always something somewhat melancholy about witnessing the entire life of a character in one story, and following Vic's trajectory from a cheerful young girl to a severely damaged grown woman is painful and heartbreaking. I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say: gurl's got issues.
And this is the best and most interesting part of the book for me. Vic is an amazing main character. Her struggles with substance abuse, motherhood, and most of all her own mind, are powerful and believable and really brought this character to life in a memorable way. At varying points she is both strong and weak -- and, as people do in real life, she often shows both sides at once. In his own review of this novel, my friend Joe Borelli of Creature Cast (himself a gifted writer), said it well -- one of the main things that drew him, myself, and many others to horror fiction over other "genre" shelves is as an "examination of human frailty". I've never had much of an interest in the superpowers of people in comic books or fantasy fiction -- I think people are always at their most interesting when they are flawed and show weakness, and I think we as readers learn more from this as well. Often writers will tack on a history of abuse or a struggle with addiction merely because it seems to make the character more interesting or help explain some of their antisocial behavior, but Vic and Maggie (a stuttering librarian that Vic meets on one of her trips across the bridge, with her own access to the inscape via a set of Scrabble tiles) struggle in a way that makes sense.
No 700+ page novel is going to be perfect. There are some great images here -- creepy children frozen under ice, bats with twisted human faces -- but I think that Christmasland as a setting will be something that divides readers into love/hate categories. The world Manx has built for himself will work for people that will enjoy the idea of taking wholesome Christmas-themed imagery and twisting it into something grotesque and awful. Fans of dark-fantasy will appreciate it, but I like my slaughterhouses a little grittier, and I actually preferred the more solidly grounded House of Sleep. Bing's "real world" home has an almost Sawyer-family quality, and as a dilapidated corpse depository it works slightly better for me than the more surreal dangers of Christmasland. It also feels like the novel hit its climax about 100 pages too soon, sort of stretching and elongating a section that felt like it should have been done with a greater sense of tension and urgency. Luckily, though, by that point I cared enough about all those involved in the story that I didn't mind plodding along for another 200 pages.
The novel asks some interesting questions about the nature of good and evil without going overboard in trying to mask it with awkward allegory or veering off into obnoxious philosophical asides -- one gets the sense that these are questions that legitimately popped into the characters' minds along the course of their journeys. I particularly love the idea that the use of magic or special abilities comes with tremendous personal sacrifice, and damages you in ways that you can't necessarily recover from. Vic and Maggie each pay dearly for the use of their abilities, and the price for entering the inscape is steep -- and eventually we learn that even Manx may not be exempt from paying the toll to cross this bridge.
Having established himself as a successful writer with a unique voice on his own merits, it's also nice for fans of the genre to see Hill not shy away from making references to Stephen King's novels throughout the course of the story. It gave a fun sense of Easter egg hunting to an already fun and enjoyable reading experience, and I can't help smiling thinking about how proud Stephen must be of his son. It's also encouraging for me as a fan to know that the family tradition of excellent, giant horror novels will continue -- the literary world is a more fun and more frightening place because of it. N0S4A2 works on several levels -- as a study in character building, as a journey of personal struggle and redemption -- but mostly it is just a damn fun read and one that will stick with you far longer than you might expect it to. Any fan of horror should give this one a spin. Rating: B+
@robrussin
(PS: I don't usually do audiobooks, but fans may be interested in hearing the fabulous Kate Mulgrew read this one)
(Joe Borelli's review can be found at http://creaturecast.blogspot.com/2013/07/nos4a2-by-joe-hill.html)
