NOS4A2

Reviews

• Michelle

  Finished June 5, 2019 · Read 3 times

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• anna

  Finished October 27, 2025

  I really disliked NOS4A2. Joe Hill seems to have inherited the worst quirks of his father’s writing; long-winded, self-indulgent, and tone deaf. Entire paragraphs are wasted describing a single movement, and the result is a bloated, 20 hour long slog that could’ve been cut in half and still felt slow. The title is really clever and is what caught my attention in the first place, but it deserves a better book. Charlie Manx kidnaps kids and takes them to “Christmasland,” gassing them with “gingerbread smoke.” It’s supposed to be creepy, but it’s more ridiculous than frightening. His sidekick Bing is even worse, and the constant rhyming and weird one-liners make them both feel like parodies of horror villains. Hill does introduce a few interesting magical elements; Vic’s bridge to find lost things, Maggie’s Scrabble-bag fortune telling, but they never quite fit together. The story is full of half-baked ideas and leftover Stephen King tropes. I didn't realize at first that they are father/son, and kept wondering why it read like a Stephen King fanfic. What really pushed this into one-star territory, though, was how genuinely unpleasant it is. There’s constant child abuse, sexual violence, and ugly misogyny. The way Muslim children are portrayed is outright offensive. Add to that the constant vulgar language, violence toward women and children, outdated language about mental illness, and it just becomes exhausting. The audiobook is just as awful. The narrator’s disjointed, sometimes singsong delivery made the experience even more grating. If I hadn’t been buddy-reading this with my husband, I’d have DNF’d within the first few hours. In short, NOS4A2 is try-hard mess. Joe Hill tried to write like his dad and ended up with a creepy, exhausting parody instead. My first Hill novel... and definitely my last.

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