Book #141 of 2016:

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

NOS4A2 is a great story, but it’s also something of a love letter from author Joe Hill to his father. The plot and the characters all feel like they could be pulled straight from a Stephen King novel, and even if Hill were not King’s son, it would be hard to avoid acknowledging the debt NOS4A2 owes to classic King horror stories like Black House, IT, or Christine. (And as though to emphasize these connections, Hill sprinkles plenty of King references throughout this book, from Shawshank and Derry to Mid-World and the True Knot.)

Yet in many ways, Hill has taken his father’s tropes and stripped them down to their essentials, adding what works to his toolkit and leaving the rest behind. A plot description of this novel, which involves a supernatural child-kidnapper being fought first by a young girl and then later by the woman grown in defense of her son, reads like quintessential King. But Hill dives deeper into the psychology of these characters than his father generally does, offering up a villain who could almost be plausibly defended as a sort of Peter Pan and a heroine whose mental illness may be slanting her perspective and her grasp on reality. NOS4A2 represents a triumph of the son outpacing the father all the way through to its explosive end.

★★★★☆

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