Stephen King’s son comes into his own

For Joe Hill, author of recent novel NOS4A2 and son of Stephen King, the poison apple doesn’t fall far from the horror tree.

Not that Hill ever exploits this literary connection with his dad, the renowned master of doorstop-size horror novels. You won’t see it mentioned on any of his book jackets, and he even took a pen name — like dear old dad did as Richard Bachman for a spell. But look at that dust jacket photo again of Hill on a motorcycle, eyebrows knit just a little too intently.

Yup, he’s got some Stephen King in him for sure. 

NOS4A2 is Hill’s third novel, and it’s an ambitious one, kind of like his dad’s The Dead Zone, but also bone-chilling scary, like Salems’ Lot. An epic battle between evil and good, it begins with old man Charlie Manx dying in a hospital bed, and young Victoria McQueen bicycling away from domestic turmoil on her Raleigh two-wheeler.

Vic, as she’s called, is a tough kid with a special talent: her bike takes her across a rickety old bridge in her imagination to whatever destination she seeks. She helps Mom locate a lost bracelet and find a missing kitten using this bike and this bridge.

But she’s not the only one with such powers. Manx is a lanky old man who drives around in a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith and physically resembles the vampire played by German actor Max Schreck in the 1922 Nosferatu — hence the car’s license plate and the book’s title. His specialty is gathering up children who are cross with their parents and taking them to a place he calls “Christmasland” — where “every morning is Christmas and happiness is against the law.” This turns out to be a place quite different from the Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas specials we might remember from long ago.

Manx, in true vampiric tradition, is in the business of siphoning something out of his young victims. In modern terms, he “drinks your milkshake,” but in a truly creepy, evil-minded fashion. The kids end up spooky, their innocence sucked from them: not quite dead, not quite living, their teeth are replaced by rows of fish hooks, their minds preoccupied with malice. (Manx is helped along by a Renfield type, an addle-brained disciple named Bing who secures tanks of dental anesthetic that helps Manx to trap his victims.) What Manx does is substitute mere entertainment and “fun” for childhood happiness, and as Vic’s friend Maggie points out, for an innocent kid, “pulling the wings off a fly counts as fun, because they don’t know any better.”

In this way, Christmasland can’t help bringing to mind Toyland, the place in Pinocchio where truant and idle boys and girls are led, fed by lies that it’s a magical land where all dreams come true and they can play all day and never have to go to school. Of course, it’s a trap. And, creepily, you can’t help thinking a bit of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, the home/theme park where he entertained countless young children, inviting many to sleep over in his room.

In this way, Hill keeps one foot in the fantasy genre, and another foot rooted in concrete, real-life terrors: kids grow up too fast, they are easily distracted by “fun” and led down paths to oblivion. Adults fall prey to drugs, alcohol and despair. They give up hope. It’s a scary world, and Hill works in enough modern pitfalls to bring it all scarily to life.

Meanwhile, Vic grows up to become estranged from her far-from-perfect parents, dimly remembering a time in her youth when she possessed a special gift; yet in time she comes to believe that gift was just imaginary; she becomes a bitter adult, passing through rehab and institutionalization. Only her drawing abilities, her relationship with a chubby comics lover named Lou Carmody, and their resulting kid Bruce Wayne (guess who named him?) seem worth much in her life. Yet she may be the only person capable of battling the evil and age-defying Charlie Manx as he resurrects his collecting voyages to Christmasland.

Reading NOS4A2 produces feelings remarkably similar to reading the best of Stephen King: creepy bad guys, salt-of-the-earth good folk (who nonetheless are allowed to have human flaws), heart-thumping suspense, and an unnerving ability to get under your skin. All are earmarks of King’s best writing.

True, there were writers of the supernatural before King — Lovecraft, Bradbury, Richard Matheson — but King brought it into the next generation. His books were peppered with brand references, things from modern life we could all recognize — Pepsi, The Ramones, a Plymouth Fury with a mind of its own. He invented a template for mixing our common pop life with our deeper fears and concerns. And it’s a sturdy template: it produces things like Justin Cronin’s The Passage, Max Brooks’ World War Z, and Joe Hill’s fictional landscape.

Not to say that Hill isn’t his own writer. He has loads of imagination, and he doles it out like a pro: the pacing of NOS4A2 is unrelenting. He puts his own spin on concepts that are already quite familiar to King readers — literary presumptions that helped the older writer construct such compelling worlds of good versus evil.

Among those literary presumptions:

• Blue collar folk are generally good at heart (except the evil ones);

• Overly religious people are either crazy or harbor sexual fears, and this makes them dangerous;

• Dead or estranged relatives often show up to offer advice or love from beyond;

• Most feds are officious robots, incapable of thinking outside the box, but there’s always one who sees the truth.

Vic herself is urged to deny her early “finding” experiences even happened. In the post-Oprah world, she’s encouraged to think she created “false memories” and “empowerment fantasies” after she experienced a childhood trauma to enable her to cope with reality. And Hill positions Lou as a kind of bridge to modern sci-fi and horror audiences: of course, he’s totally equipped to believe Vic’s story is true; he’s read so many comic books (and probably Stephen King novels) that he can see all the angles coming.  

Hill also works in some of his own obsessions, tattoos, comics and motorcycles being among them; his earlier novel Heart Shaped Box also involved a lot of spirited motorcycling. In this one, Vic replaces her Raleigh 3-speed with a vintage British Triumph (product placement reigns supreme in the King bloodline).

One curious note, though, is that Hill doesn’t go out his way to thank his dad for help or inspiration in the “Acknowledgments” page. He singles out his mom for her editing and writing advice, and for teaching him “how to be a father.” Almost as an afterthought, the 41-year-old Hill then thanks his dad for taking a motorcycle ride with him while writing this book, “following him along his back roads with the sun on my shoulder.”

“I guess I’ve been cruising down his back roads my whole life,” Hill concludes. “I don’t regret it.”

Who knows? There may be fodder here for another horror novel about father-son relationships in that very statement. But at the very least, with NOS4A2, it’s clear that Hill is shifting gears and tearing out on his own momentum now.