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Nos4r2

Joe Hill’s NOS4R2 is no love bug. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to write a doorstop American horror novel about a haunted classic car. Comparisons to Christine are always going to be difficult to avoid. And even more so – let’s get this out of the way nice and early – when you happen to be the son of Stephen King, as Joe Hill is.

Hill’s writing is smart and assured and bursting with his own style and personality. NOS4R2 – and this is not meant as a criticism – feels more like the sort of thing his dad would do.

Perhaps that’s intentional – maybe NOS4R2 is meant as a homage to those big Eighties horror novels. It certainly has the feel of one, the heft and the scope. But the biggest box that it ticks is that it’s genuinely scary, and you can’t really ask more of a horror novel than that.

Joe Hill serves up Christmasland, a place where it really is Christmas every day, where it always snows and snowmen wave and there are always presents under the tree. Lucky boys and girls get to go to Christmasland … they sacrifice most of their humanity and start to grow wicked little hooks in place of teeth, but hey, it’s Christmas every day, right?

Christmasland is the “inscape” – like an escape, but somewhere inside you – of Charles Talent Manx, who drives around America in a Rolls-Royce Wraith with the numberplate NOS4R2 (in case you haven’t got it yet, it’s “Nosferatu”), kidnapping children.