NOS4A2: Joe Hill – Book Review

A modern vampire story for a modern era, NOS4A2 is engaging, fun, and at least a little scary at times.

Horror is a difficult genre to write, and as someone who has written at least a few pages in every genre, I’d say possibly the most difficult. When you are writing fantasy, you have merely to entertain (if you will permit the use of ‘merely’ to describe such a difficult goal). When you are writing comedy, you seek to make the reader laugh, and every reader wants to laugh. When you are writing drama, you seek to keep the reader in suspense, it makes the reader turn pages constantly. In contrast, when you write horror, you have to entertain, to provide suspense, and to scare–but the suspense has to be delicately balanced to make the reader uneasy without making them quit. They have to keep reading, keep turning the page, perhaps even against their better judgment. Horror junkies seek to be scared and entertained, but despite wanting to be scared, our minds fight against it, grow resistant to it, so scaring a person is not so easy as writing “The zombie shambled suspensefully towards the cornered survivors.” We’ve all seen that.

With NOS4A2,  Joe Hill enters fully into the realm of the horror novel, with a very hefty side helping of contemporary fantasy. The book, in narrative style, borrows heavily from the style of his father (Stephen King), but as I’ve mentioned before Joe Hill still lacks the subtlety that can come only from narrative practice. NOS4A2 reads more like a screen play than a horror novel; there are scenes which could be legitimately terrifying, if not for the fact that the reader knows the outcome. I feel this is hard to articulate, so I will deign to provide an example without any spoilers.

“Character X thought to himself that Y would likely survive far longer than he would.”

Alright, foreshadowing, right? You see where this is going; either X or Y will die, right? But the next line dispenses with all of the potential suspense, saying “He was right.” The reader now knows, without requiring any stretch of imagination or thought, that X is going to die soon. At the time of the thought, X was in no immediate danger, but a few paragraphs later… Well, I knew what was going to happen, and how it was going to happen. In a movie, however, without the internal thoughts of the narrator and the character, that scene could, or would have been masterful (given that Horns got its own film, I will not be surprised if NOS4A2 gets one as well).

Narrative difficulties aside, the story is certainly engaging, the characters fleshed out, and the world alive. The fantasy elements of the story are nothing completely new but Hill weaves them together very well, giving us a villain who is both terrifying and … Lovable? Pitiable? There are many things one feels towards Charlie Manx in the course of the book, and I think that is what makes an interesting antagonist. It is difficult to really articulate the feelings one feels towards Charlie without spoilers, but it seems to me that it is more difficult to hate a person who is broken than one who is evil. Victoria, the protagonist, has a very rough time as the primary focus of this book; starting in 1986 and covering various periods of her life right through to 2013, we follow her though events that would destroy many people (and do, to a degree, destroy her). The secondary characters fare little better, but this is a novel in the horror genre; no one expects them to have an easy time of it.

An issue with writing horror is that of giving the correct amount of information; too little information and the reader is confused, too much and the ability to frighten them is gone. For me, too much information is given; there are, as the book’s plot enters its most mature stage, three primary and independent parties. You know who is in them, their thoughts and feelings, their assumptions; rather than writing in a limited third person perspective, as Hill did with Horns, you are given the third person omniscient. Third person omniscient gives you the ability to piece together everything on your own, and the scares are at best watered down, and at worst… Well, boring or predictable come to mind–but even in the scenes that should have been scary, I was certainly engaged and interested. For all that I was able to piece together exactly what would happen, I was always interested in reading how it would happen, and that sort of engagement is what makes a book a real page-turner.

For all of my criticisms, I cared what happened to everyone in the book. I cared for Victoria, for her son Wayne, for his father Lou. I cared for some of the characters who are introduced late in the novel, their fears and insecurities giving them life in a life threatening situation. As an avid fan of the horror genre, I was able to piece together who would make it, who wouldn’t, when those who would die were going to die, but even so–it was important to me to see it happen, to understand the motivations behind each act. If the horror is dissipated by knowledge, the empathy towards the characters is magnified 50-fold; whether that is good or bad depends on what the reader expects to get out of the experience of this book. Joe Hill may be young in his writing style, but he creates characters more human than authors with ten times his experience, and that is a gift that not everyone ever achieves.

I’d also like to praise the selection of the car bearing the license plate NOS4A2 in the book. When choosing a classic car, it is easy to fall into the easy trap of the 60s, muscle cars with a stunningly low level of subtlety and uniqueness. A muscle car, to people who are not already fans of cars, tends to look like any other; blocky, chunky, like the idea of comparing a heavily muscled body builder to Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt may be a bit more understated, but still is incredibly attractive. The car chosen for NOS4A2 is the 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith, a masterwork of understated beauty and design.

Perhaps he used all of the subtlety he had crafting the characters and choosing the car, but even if that were the case, I can definitely leave this book happy.