Horror by Joe Hill: NOS4A2, or How to Make Christmas Creepy

I love a good horror story, and Joe Hill's NOS4A2 is a good horror story.  In fact, it was a great horror story. It had true fear and horror, great characters and a fascinating storyline.

I read it on three platforms — audio, e-book and print book — and it was great in each. In fact, I would strongly recommend giving Kate Mulgrew's audio performance a try, no matter your stance on audiobooks.

However, it was relentless enough, and long enough, to make me beg for sweet release by the end.

Plus, I can never stomach how the King men kill animals in their novels. (Seriously, guys, just stop it. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Even when it makes total sense and makes the story more poignant, resist the urge. Thank you.)

Okay, back to the topic at hand. I started the book a couple of times since its publication in 2013. I got as far as the prologue, maybe a couple of pages into the body of the book, and put it down. It was weird and fascinating, but it didn't snag me. Why the nurse? Why this kid? Lots of portended creepiness, but nothing concrete.

Then I let Kate Mulgrew pull me in with that throaty voice I've loved since "Ryan's Hope." Her portrayal of the characters was sincere and gripping. (A couple of them sounded more like Minnesota hicks than I would have imagined them to, like Lou, but it fit their personas.) Because I was switching between platforms, I never heard her read Maggie Leigh, for which I am grateful.

I loved Maggie. I found her flawed and tragic, and the progression of her story was poignant and gorgeous. I would love to read a book in which Maggie is the central character.

I think.

I am still processing how brittle and flawed Hill makes his female characters, and what the male characters of his story have to contribute to the definition and capabilities of the females. I think every character has a chance at redemption — well, nearly every one — and most work hard to become more of who and what they are. It's a lovely progression, even for the people who appear to be villains. (Not all "villains" actually are villainous, after all. Some are just incapable of being more than their weaknesses.)

As much as I enjoyed the story, Hill has taken on the mantle of writing the horrific joy out of a scene by stuffing it full of superfluous information, buffoonish characters and ridiculous situations. I stopped reading Stephen King for a while for that same reason, and now still approach his work with the same caution. I am sorry to do the same thing with Hill.

I am about to discuss details of the storyline, so if you have not read the book, beware spoilers.

Okay, you've been warned.

Proceed with caution, or skip the following bulleted paragraphs.

• Hill belabored the haunted telephones that drove Vic to destruction and institutionalization. It didn't spiral, but dragged. Snipped a little, the scene could have been even scarier and more haunting — but instead, readers wove through the longest streets in Denver with a woman in underwear that, inexplicably, no one seemed to see.

• Hill handled Charlie Manx's autopsy scene with an unexpected level of clumsiness. The security guard was totally ridiculous, a sex-crazed stupid kid who was even more useless than Barney Fife. The senseless buffoon felt superfluous and distracted from the horror of the situation. 

• How did a dead man and a masked psychopath in a huge, vintage car move in across the street from Linda McQueen's house without detection? In every neighborhood in which I have lived, everyone knew everyone else's business. Even if I wasn't in the know about, say, the Brown family, Mrs. Herrera was, and she told us. Major loss didn't distract us from each other, so Linda's death should not have created such a vacuum of observation.

• Finally, the ending was way too weird. No municipality would have allowed Sleigh House to remain standing (such as it was) after all of these years, thanks to back taxes, death and human heebie-jeebies. Children who have not aged in centuries would be hard for anyone to accept, even an open-minded fibbie. I loved that Lou had to break the spell, but if NOS4A2 was the key to Manx's power, why in the world didn't Manx's power end when NOS4A2 did?

Thus endeth the spoilers.

I don't know if I can recommend this book. Have you read it? Would you recommend it? Why?

Get Ready: All Hallow's Read is Around the Corner!

Neil Gaiman had a great idea: give a scary book for Halloween. Here, let me let him tell you himself:

I fully support All Hallow's Read, but I'm a little different: I give poems with the candy.  This year, Halloween falls on Poetry Wednesday, so you can get your poetry fix right here.

Feel free to print out the poem I post October 31 and give it to the trick-or-treaters who come to your door. (If you need the title early so you can better prepare, let me know.)

Other poems I've shared in years past include "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe and "The Little Ghost" by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

So, what are you reading this All Hallow's Read?

If you're looking for a novel, I suggest John Dies at the End by David Wong. I just finished it and if I could explain it, I would get a medal. It was wild, freaky and very, very good.

I also will be reading Shadow of Night (and re-reading A Discovery of Witches, which is totally worthy of a re-read). Or maybe working on the Fever series by Karen Marie Moning (thanks for the recommendation, Karen!).

What would you recommend? Do you have different recommendations for different people? Let us know!

Book Review: The White Devil

Justin Evans hopefully had a much more enjoyable experience as an American student abroad than he gives Andrew in his latest novel, The White Devil.  As a former student, the author provides the story with a level of authenticity of living conditions only he could share.

However, the school is not as interesting nor as well-examined, as I would have hoped — though that's because his characters did not leave room for a dank, damp, drafty old school.

Andrew is sent overseas to straighten out his life at Harrow, an an English boarding school his father declares is his son's "last chance" at — redemption, regret, attitude adjustment, maybe all of the above.  Alas, his uncanny resemblance to a famous, beautiful alumnus draws the attention from an unlikely source: the school ghost.

This is not just any old ghost.  Rather, this one is linked to a larger-than-life Harrow alumnus steeped in lore and mystery — and, most importantly, romance.

Being inside the head of a teenage boy for a few hundred pages was truly educational.  Additionally, this beautiful boy had no shortage of suitors, including young women with bad reputations and hormone-focused agendas.  And yet there was still time for research, essay-writing, reading poetry, rehearsing a play and getting, ahem, to know other people (not least of which is a promiscuous, lonely and pitiful teenage girl surrounded by boys).

The story was fraught with emotion, hormones, fear (imagined and real) and chance.  It required staid characters to climb out of their comfort zones, which can be exciting.  I liked the characters, staid and unhinged.  Some were drawn with very bold, thick strokes, but sometimes finding the familiar in a character makes the story easier to follow.

After finishing the book, I needed to think about it.  I was a little disappointed with the ending, which at first seemed too obvious, having been telegraphed from one of the (too obvious) clues in the novel.  However, in retrospect, it makes sense — and carries the terribly, terribly romantic story to a nearly Wagnerian ending.

In the end, it was an interesting treatment of a ghost story, unique enough to keep the die-hard ghosty interested and familiar enough to satisfy traditionalists.

Book Review: The Summer of Night

I am a fan of Dan Simmons.  I loved the shocking rollercoaster that was Drood and enjoyed greatly the complex Native American lore of Black Hills.  I didn't mind too much when he took his time getting to where he was getting because I figured it would be interesting.

When Summer of Night took its sweet time, I thought it was par for the course.  I also had a flashback to The Terror, a book that gave me nightmares and took too long to even start.  I nearly stopped reading once or twice: once because it involved a situation with an animal (which was telegraphed from the beginning) and once because it was boring.  Only an early tease prompted me to keep going.

In the end, I found it a long trip on a short road.  It wasn't bad, but it could have been tighter, which would have made it more intense.

A school in a small midwestern town is closing due to low enrollment.  However, a child goes missing on the last day of school, and administrators seem unconcerned because his family is not reputable.  A group of rising sixth graders become suspicious and begin investigating as only youngsters can: under the radar, noticed only by the driver of the redering truck.

The clues are funky: unusual but a little too far out to be plausible, even under the most extreme of circumstances.  Adults ignore the children at the right times under the right circumstances so they can discover clues.  People die under the most implausible cirstances, covered over by the slimiest of bad guys.

In the end, it's not a bad "junk food" book, but it's shouldn't be your first choice of junk food books.  You can do better for shlocky horror.

Nevermore!

Proof that poetry geeks have a sense of humor.

Note from Dave (of Little Fivers.com — Horror):

James McTeigue, director of "V for Vendetta" and the upcoming "Ninja Assassin," will direct "The Raven," a fictionalized account of the final five days of Edgar Allan Poe's life which sees Poe join the hunt for a serial killer whose murders are inspired by his stories.

So, since we know the film is fiction, what was Poe actually doing for the last days of his life?

The Top 9 Things Poe Was Doing in His Final Days

9.Three words: Time-traveling Goth chicks.

8. Hid a clock under his nosy landlady's floorboards and enjoyed the show.

7. Lying in the cellar, passed out in a puddle of amontillado.

6. Trying desperately to remember how he ended up in the back of the stables, sans trousers.

5. Composed an ode to a football franchise of the future.

4. Bricked up his neighbor behind a wall, just for old time's sake.

3. Let's just say that if PETA ever finds out what he did to that raven, there's gonna be trouble!

2. Drafting a legal memo justifying pendulum-blade-lowering and live burial as "outside the strict definition of torture."

and the Number 1 Thing Poe Was Doing in His Final Day...

1. Filling in for cartoonist Bil Keane during a particularly dark week of Family Circus.

(Now, go check out the Little Fiver lists available! There might be one with your name on it.)

Copyright 2009 by Chris White, courtesy Top Five