Infernal Combustion Engine
by James Roland
For the layman, every car runs by magic. Under the hood lies an oil-slick mass of tubes and pipes and fire, bound together by basic science, brought to life with a simple flick of a key, but when it roars to life it becomes something far more than its parts.
I’ve often wondered if mechanics ever think about these things while they’re on a dolly, twisting bolts. And I wonder if Joe Hill ever stood back and admired the rolling beast of a novel that is NOS4A2 or if he was too focused on all the moving parts to really appreciate what he created.
At its core, this story follows Charlie Manx, a very bad man who drives a killer Rolls Royce powered by the souls of happy children. He cruises the American byways, from the Rockies to New England, snatching children from their parents and sucking them dry, depositing their withered husks in a magical place called Christmasland. All the narrative’s moving parts branch out from this single idea, creating a far more complex tale that deals with the themes of family, the loss of innocence, and the personal toll of creativity.
Manx is what the author dubs a “Creative”, a person with the ability to imagine things into reality. He imagines Christmasland, a magical theme park filled with snow and candy and spilled guts and severed limbs, a place where the childlike Id runs rampant and unchecked.
Another Creative, the young Vic McQueen, imagines the Shorter Way, a rickety covered bridge that appears if she rides her bike fast enough and transports her over any distance to any location she truly needs. When Vic accidentally uses the imaginary bridge to find Manx’s secret lair and causes his eventual capture, Manx swears his revenge and lies in wait for years, eventually tracking down a grown-up Vic and kidnapping her son.
The story leaps forward in time, turning our young, spunky protagonist into a washed-up children’s book author with a history of mental illness, drug abuse, and arson. Though jarring at first, this time warp cements the story’s strongest theme: the loss of innocent youth and the perpetual “plan b” of adult life. This shift demands much of the reader, who has just settled in for a tale about a talented youth who bests a villainous adult, but ultimately it’s the 700-page tome’s greatest strength.
Vic McQueen makes a heart-wrenching protagonist — a complex mess of brutal happenstance, bad choices, and amazing feats of love and devotion. The emotional and physical damage she endures by the final pages is fantastical but never masochistic. Hill does not punish his heroine, rather he strips her down to the one thing that every great protagonist needs: sheer will. It’s not Vic’s magic bridge or bad-ass bike that saves the day, it’s her ability to handle ungodly amounts of physical pain and emotional heartache. The fact that she goes through all of this to save the life of her son makes it all the more potent. Vic is a hero because she is a mother; to Hill those words are synonymous.
Hill even dedicated the book to his mother Tabitha and included many references to the works of his father Stephen (King, if you somehow missed the internet frenzy after Hill’s first novel was released). Hill’s short fiction and first two novels could be compared to his father’s work in terms of theme and subject matter, but with NOS4A2 Hill has tackled the comparison head on, going so far as to set his novel (and retroactively his first two novels) in the same story-verse as much of his father’s work. The gates to Mid-World (the realm of King’s Dark Tower books) are mentioned, as well as Pennywise the Clown from It. Hill even mentioned the True Knot, a band of spirit-sucking vagabonds from King’s upcoming sequel to The Shining, helping to keep the family business alive and well with free promotion.
At first the references might seem like pointless fan-pandering, but on closer examination they make sense. This is a story about generations, about legacy, about the power of family … and how devotion to creativity can tear that family apart. The ending is a sometimes stunning, sometimes cliche love letter to the family unit, as two generations of McQueens battle against the forces of evil to save the youngest family member.
While the book is filled with plenty of chills, thrills, and carnage, the characters are the real attraction. The finale in Christmasland, with its bizarro imagery, sharp-toothed children, and dangling body parts, is likely to appease horror fans, but it’s the touching, quiet epilogue that sticks with you after the final page.
I don’t think NOS4A2 is Hill’s best novel, but it feels like his most personal, which makes it very special. The story is sprawling and occasionally vague, but full of imagination and wicked cool ideas that compliment each other in retrospect but don’t always work on the page. The narrative careens down the road, hugging corners, occasionally screeching to sudden stops, but ultimately gets the reader to their destination — a little jostled, but glad they took the ride.
Click here for our interview with Joe Hill from 2008.
Click here for our review of Joe Hill’s last novel, Horns.
NOS4A2
Author: Joe Hill
Publisher: William Morrow
Date: October 15, 2013
Available at: All major booksellers
Price: $17.00 (hardback), $11.00 (paperback)
