Victoria "Vic" McQueen discovered she had an unusual talent at the ripe old age of eight, discovered it the first time she rode her too-large bicycle through that abandoned covered bridge in Haverhill, Massachusetts, her home town. What she discovered when she popped out the other end of the bridge wasn't the opposite bank of the Merrimack River -- it was the place where her mother had lost her favorite bracelet that same morning. Vic, she learned, had a talent for finding, and that Shorter Way Bridge was her route from lost to found.
Other people had their own talents and their own means for short-circuiting the journey from then to now; now to then. When she was 13, Vic met another one; Here, Iowa, librarian Maggie Leigh; whose supernatural Scrabble tiles foretold Vic's future... "THE BRAT COULD FIND THE WRAITH." The Wraith?
About that Wraith: it was a 1938 Rolls-Royce adorned with Kansas vanity plates NOS4A2. Like Vic's bridge and Maggie's Scrabble tiles, the Wraith was the tool by which an adept could slice the veil. That person's talent, however, was not fortune-telling or finding lost objects. Charles Talent Manx specified that particular set of vanity plates because his talent was to suck the life out of children, much like the vampire Nosferatu; to take children to the world he called Christmasland where their life force could keep him young.
That was the Wraith Vic McQueen and the Shorter Way Bridge could find... perhaps.
NOS4A2 marks the third novel from Joe Hill, who burst on the scene in 2007 with Heart-Shaped Box and followed it up in 2010 with Horns. It's three years later, and he's ba-a-a-a-ack! with a sweeping thriller that dwells half in the real world and half in that made-up world each of us has, a world called an "inscape."
Hill's latest takes his readers on some pretty strange twists and turns, all of which are testament to an imagination that's clearly been stimulated by exposure to his famous writer parents, Stephen and Tabitha King. Hill manages to recycle one of his father's earlier ideas - the Rolls Wraith is every bit as self-aware (and evil) as the Plymouth Fury in King's Christine - and he pays an homage to Cujo with the appearance of another big St. Bernard. He honors his mother even more, naming a character Tabitha.
The plot, however, is all Joe Hill's...
| NOS4A2 covers a span of twenty-five years and about half the country, but oddly the novel has at most about a dozen characters. For a thriller over 700 pages long, the cast seemed to be a bit... thin at first: I had expected an ensemble like those that populate Daddy's The Stand or Under the Dome. Hill's two previous novels also had limited casts, though, and neither suffered for that. What seemed different about this outing was that it started pretty slow: in Horns, for instance, Ig finds his new "talent" on about page three, and in Heart-Shaped Box the eponymous carton makes its appearance in the first chapter. NOS4A2, on the other hand, seemed to sort of bumble along for two or three hundred pages. |
That was then, however. As Hill cautiously ramped up the action, a novel that seemed to have been a slow starter became harder and harder to lay aside for such mundane chores as sleeping or eating. By the final reel, so to speak, the eReader was dancing and the old heart was pounding like a jackhammer. The man not only knows how to write, he knows how to sneak up on you! It's just too bad that it took so long for him to get to the point.
As an inveterate reader of acknowledgments, which puts me on Hill's "Nice List," I learned that his mother suggested a rewrite for the final chapter. Having no idea what his original was like, I have to wonder if Mama made it worse - because except for one charming aspect, the closing chapter is just not a good ending. Guess I go back on the "Naughty List" for dissing Tabitha, but what was she thinking?!
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