Review: NOS4R2 by Joe Hill

HILL, Joe, NOS4R2, Gollancz/Orion Publishing Group, London, 2014.

Octavo; paperback; 692pp. Small bump to the fore-edge of the front wrapper; else near fine.

Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s architect for the Final Solution, had a “heart of iron” and child-bearing hips. No seriously: look it up. It was one of two things that caused others to look askance at him and think ‘this, is Der Fuehrer’s poster boy for the Aryan race?’ The other thing was the fact that he was Jewish (well, on balance, it’s most likely that he actually wasn’t, but who am I to cut him any slack on the issue now, regardless of the fact that he’s roasting in Hell?).

In fact, looking at the entire line up of the Third Reich’s top dogs, you’ve got to ask yourself ‘is this the best that they can do?’ Goebbels looks like a spiv; Himmler comes across as a feckless accountant; and the only contest I’d be worried about getting involved in with Göring is a wurst-snarfling one, complete with lederhosen und bier. One look at Heydrich and you’re thinking ‘this thunder-thighed sociopath with the mincing gait is the epitome of Teutonic manhood? Please.’ One look at a photo of the Third Reich’s gathered high command and you’re seeing a bunch of schlubs in bad-fitting uniforms and wondering if their combined IQ is reaching double digits. It just goes to show that you’ve got to look like Fox Mulder to rock a Hugo Boss ensemble and no-one in Hitler’s inner circle could pull that off.

And yet: look at the evil they unleashed upon the world.

What does this have to do with Joe Hill’s latest book? It’s this: in NOS4R2, Hill generates the same chilling disjunction between appearance and action that these guys did back in the day. The two villains of the piece – Charles Talent Manx III and Bing “The Gasmask Man” Partridge – are two dumb-looking losers who have little to nothing going for them and yet they unlock a world of carnage that is truly terrifying. It takes quite a lot for something to give me the kind of nightmares that make me want to return to sleep with the lights on, and that happened before I was even halfway through.

Anyone who’s even semi-regularly following this blog knows that I’m a fan of Joe Hill’s work. I’m happy to announce that, with this novel, he’s finally made the transition from short story writer to novelist. That sounds harsh but let me reiterate what I’ve said before: Heart-Shaped Box was a novella spread too thin; Horns was meatier, but could still have used an edit; NOS4R2, on the other hand, fits comfortably in the space provided for it. There’s none of Heart-Shaped Box’s tedious travel sequences - off to discover a random plot point from a distant second-string character - with associated brooding; there’s none of the endless brutalising of the protagonist to draw out scenes that punctuated Horns; each element of NOS4R2 clicks nicely into place to make a sweetly-humming whole. I would say it’s like a Swiss watch, but that would be resorting to cliché. None of this is to say that I wouldn’t, or don’t, recommend Hill’s books very highly; I do, it’s just that for all of his books’ energy, talent and chutzpah, there are flaws. Flaws which, I’m glad to say, have been overcome.

The basic premise of this new book is this: Victoria “Vic” McQueen, is given a pushbike as a child and discovers that with it she can drive through an old covered bridge near her house to the location of anything which she is trying to find. In this way she unearths her mother’s bangle, a friend’s stuffed toy, a treasured photograph and her neighbours’ dead cat. Doing so causes herself serious neurological damage, ranging from migraines to potential aneurysms, and this gives her cause to believe that the whole process is an hallucination of some kind - not least because the bridge she crosses demonstrably collapsed when she was very young. At age seventeen, while looking for a person to explain her gift, she encounters stammering Maggie Leigh, a librarian with a Scrabble bag, the letters of which tell her the answers to questions that she poses, and Maggie warns her to avoid seeking out “Manx”, claiming that an encounter with him at her early age would be too dangerous. Vic, tired of being told what she can and cannot do, an attitude fuelled by the collapse of her parents’ marriage, runs away from home and seeks Charlie Manx anyway.

The encounter, as predicted by Maggie, goes badly. Manx is intrigued by Vic’s ability, which he claims is not unlike his own, and, when he determines that Vic isn’t going to be part of his plans, locks her in his house and allows it to burn down around her. She barely escapes, fleeing to a nearby highway where an overweight biker takes her to a gas station and safety. While there however, Manx pulls up outside: the people at the petrol station try to detain him – Manx kills one of them horribly and the others apprehend him. Manx is revealed to be a child abductor and murderer but, as his guilt is declared, he falls into a mysterious coma.

Vic stays in Gunbarrel Colorado, a continent away from her east-coast family, where she shacks up with Lou Carmody, the geeky fat biker who rescued her, and they eventually have a son together. Her life starts to go off the rails as dead kids from “Christmasland” begin mysteriously phoning her, although no-one else can hear them. Her sanity riding a knife edge, she discovers that developing her latent artistic talents helps keep the children at bay. She pens a number of Where’s Wally-esque kids’ books that bring her fame and fortune, but nevertheless the voices break through: she burns down her house, separates from her de facto husband and child, and ends up in the loony bin.

Manx, in the meantime, goes about his business. All along, we have the impression that Manx is far older than he seems – his dialogue is punctuated by archaisms and his attitudes are prudish and antiquated. He employs Bing Partridge as his assistant and they drive around the country abducting children who – Manx says – will one day turn to bad ways or sordid ends due to the as yet un-manifested poor choices of their parents. Manx takes the children to “Christmasland”, where sadness is banned and every day waits in breathless anticipation of Santa, while Partridge - armed with tanks of industrial-grade, gingerbread-scented, knock-out gas and the gas mask that saved his father’s life in the Korean War - has his chillingly wicked way with their parents. They drive around the country in a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith with the vanity plates “NOS4R2”, a vehicle that is sentient and seemingly, an extension of Charlie Manx’s consciousness – move over Christine!

Manx dies in prison hospital and, after his autopsy and due to the intervention of a wayward morgue security guard who likes to take selfies with dead semi-celebrities, he revives, clobbers the guard with a hammer-like medical tool, steals the guy’s car and makes for a rendezvous with Bing. They whistle up NOS4R2, set out to find Vic McQueen, and orchestrate their revenge...

It’s not a premise that can be easily summed up in a paragraph.

There are multiple narratives overlapping and intertwining here and Hill keeps them all perfectly balanced and moving. The information we need as readers – Manx’s activities; various characters’ super-powers – is doled out easily and without ever seeming heavy-handed. It’s a slick piece of world-building that runs on rails. Points of view shift easily and the action moves as the characters change locations – every change of set signals the start of a new chapter, one chapter taking place entirely in a laundry chute. Location, activity and time are the fundamental engines of the tale and the narrative flows smoothly because of this focus.

Speaking of world-building, there is an energy to this work that puts it streets ahead of the premise established in Horns. Part of my issue with that book was that it harped (see what I did there?) too much on Christian mystical symbolism, with stage-y set-ups and pile-driver puns. Imposing the dogma onto the story necessarily threw a framework over the narrative which Hill was battling against in order to surprise the reader, practically from page one. In this new novel, the world is Hill’s to create – he isn’t pinned down by any outside pre-conceptions or logic, other than the ones he brings to his own table – and the story is fresh and exciting as a result. (Strangely enough, this is exactly the reason I dislike reading a lot of fantasy and sci-fi: I hate paddling around in other people’s views of how the world works and how it should be. With horror, you have to take the world as it is, before injecting the horrifying element into it.) I suspect that his experiments with the graphic novel form have had an inspirational effect on Hill’s plotting instincts.

(That being said, however, there are a few moments where he can’t help himself and lets loose with some extended shaggy-dog set-ups leading to awful punchlines. Most of these revolve around Tabitha Hutton, an FBI agent who shows up midway-through, and are mercifully short-ish, so the less said about them, the better.)

A thing I really like about this novel is the presence of strong and interesting female leads. The name McQueen threw me a little at first – given the motorcycle link later on – and I was wondering if Hill had started writing the protagonist as a guy, riffing off notions of Steve McQueen. I like the final choice however (assuming there was one), and the novel is more powerful as a result. A thing I do like about Hill’s stories is that he takes care with his characters: unlike James Herbert, Ramsay Campbell and, indeed, his father Stephen King, he doesn’t just set up a victim at the start of a passage only to eviscerate them gleefully by the end. This always leaves me frustrated, since I’ve had to invest time learning about a person only to see them killed off three paragraphs later. There are no fewer random deaths in Hill’s books; it’s just that these corn-chip characters are given some time to develop in earlier passages, not simply a quick “intro-then-cull”. I wouldn’t say that Hill’s secondary characters are incredibly nuanced, but they certainly have more depth than you’ll find in the average contemporary horror novel.

It’s his main characters that are the bonus however. In this case, Vic McQueen, Charlie Manx, Maggie Leigh, Bing Partridge and Lou Carmody are the gold. Each of them contributes substantially to the plot (Lou’s geeky adherence to comics literature overcomes much potential resistance to the belief that his wife has super-powers) and are finely-crafted individuals whose motivations are revealed in various subtle ways, not spelt out in heavy-handed blocks of text. Vic’s struggles with substance abuse and parenting confidence are tense and well-presented, never denigrated or judged; Maggie’s life story is revealed by the cigarette burns on her arms and her love of literature, more than anything overtly stated; and Partridge is a solid lesson (which the baddies never seem to get) in why evil guys are evil and can’t be trusted. Although he professes his undying adoration of Manx and his fervent wish to live forever in Christmasland, he can’t resist taking a shot at the back of Manx’s head when the opportunity presents itself.

There’s a lot happening in this book and the fact that the good guys’ motives are sometimes shaky and the bad guy’s motives are not so clear-cut make it that much more interesting. The one truly evil and inhuman character in the tale is, literally, not human: the Rolls Royce Wraith is as creepy as it’s possible to be, without the ability to speak or interact in anything other than a catch-and-carry capacity. At one point (after Manx is in prison) NOS4R2 is sold off to a car restorer at a federal auction and the hapless new owner is duly captured and deposited at Bing Partridge’s front door as soon as the repair work is complete. It’s interesting that Hill chose British automobiles as the mystical motors in his story – the Roller and, later, Vic’s Triumph Bonneville – instead of something more local like a Harley Davidson, say. I guess it’s an extension of that Hollywood thing where all of the baddies have English accents...

Fundamentally though, this tale works because the baddies are BAD and, despite the fact that they are neither intellectual nor physical powerhouses, they are just so single-minded about their goals and aims that they get the drop on everyone at every turn. As I inferred above, sentient automobiles and access to nightmare dimensions aside, these two are like the “Dumb and Dumber” of nightmare central and the rest of the cast simply underestimate them at every turn allowing them to get away with hideous slaughter. As villains go, these two are the scariest I’ve seen in ages. I winced every time one of the good characters fell into danger; these two, I was cheering them on to their own particular Nurembergs and wishing the very worst for them.

What didn’t I like about this book? Hmm. There is one thing that niggles, but only slightly, and much less so with this outing than Horns. Hill doesn’t hold people to any kind of exacting standard: he fully expects people to take the easy way; indulge their vices at each opportunity; lie, cheat, and steal if they think that they can get away with it: he has no illusions about where we’re all headed. In Horns, given Ig’s ability to know everyone’s darkest secrets, it was easy to trot out the expected stereotypes which the story demanded: of course the priest was sleeping with the church secretary; of course she was embezzling the church funds; of course the two local deputies were acting out their repressed homoerotic urges for each other on the local ne’er-do-wells. The demands of the narrative structure meant that these revelations were essential to the plot. There’s not so much of that here, but Hill does tend to place his characters into two distinct camps – white hats; black hats - and play to expectations as a result. Every now and then, things start to get a little rose-tinted and apple-pie-y (usually right before the baddies hit town). It’s nowhere near as bad as, say, some of King’s earlier books but there’s a treacley margin that Hill skates awfully close to on occasion.

That’s it. Do yourself a favour: go out and buy this – it’s too good an experience to miss. I’ll be having nightmares for a week! On top of that, I’m also hanging out for the movie and geeking out about the casting opportunities (please, please, please don’t cast Jack Black as Lou!).

Five tentacled horrors from me.