NOS4A2 – Joe Hill

Using her oversized bike, young Victoria McQueen has the uncanny ability to use an abandoned bridge to find missing things, something she tries to rationalize away as she gets older.  When she goes looking for the Wraith, a 1938 Rolls-Royce used by Charles Talent Manx to kidnap children and bring them to Christmasland, where he uses their life forces to keep himself young and vibrant.  The encounter between Victoria and Manx leaves the former a broken shell of her former self and the latter in prison, accused of kidnapping and sexual assault.  Years later, after his car is restored by an unwitting father, Manx returns, going after Victoria and her son.  Can she stop Manx before he brings her child to Christmasland?

Way back in 2017, when I finished Joe Hill’s The Fireman, I said “I still have Hill’s other 2 novels waiting on the Kindle app.  I’m pretty sure that it won’t take me another 4 years to get back to them.”  Seven years later, I finally got to one of them, NOS4A2, which was published in 2013.  While I enjoyed this work, it did suffer from some of the same issues I had with the previous works of his that I’ve read, mainly going on and on when a tighter edit could have led to a better result.  He hasn’t published a new novel since 2016, so I still have just the one waiting to read.  Here’s hoping it won’t take another seven years to get to it.