NOS4A2 by Joe Hill - Book Review

When a young girl finds herself able to find lost things simply by thinking about them and riding across a bridge near her home, she is thrust into a nightmare that won’t end for almost 30 years.

Caught in a never-ending battle with the evil Charles Manx, Victoria is in a race against time to save not only herself but also the stolen children abducted by the evil Wraith and his accomplice, Bing.

The story follows Victoria from childhood as she desperately searches for the truth behind the crazy child-abductor who transports his victims to a fabled place called Christmasland. Along the way, she meets the mysterious Maggy, another person able to locate missing things but through scrabble tiles, she keeps in a bag close to her. 

Spanning almost 3 decades, this tale of horror will not end until one of them will find a way to restore reality, defeat Manx and end his reign of terror once and for all.

Although still a relatively new writer when this book was released, you can see right from the get-go that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Joe Hill, aka Joseph Hillstrom King, is following in his father’s footsteps in more ways than one. This story could have been written by the master himself, the incredible detail in building the atmosphere around the story constructed with such precision that it’s hard to fault.

The story in itself is delightfully fresh, a new take on the old NOS4A2 phenomenon. It has quite a few unsuspected twists that will keep you entertained, as well as some well-written horror sequences that tend to remind you of just who Joe Hill is related to.

But reading this book as a standalone novel, I found it to be totally engrossing, ending in a way I hoped for, the way a good horror story should be told.