NOS4R2 by Joe Hill REVIEW

BOOK REVIEW Nosferatu on wheels

Why you can trust 12DOVE Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.

NOS4R2 book review .

NOS4R2 – not your ordinary title for not your ordinary novel. It's a name which seems to fit the material perfectly: playful, textspeak-contemporary with a dark sense of humour; referential but reinvented with one foot in the past and another in the now, nodding at the classic vampire myth but assuring you: This. Isn't. That.

Our “vamp” is Charles Talent Manx III, a rankly saccharine relic with a toothpick smile, who kidnaps children in his bewitched Rolls Royce Wraith (numberplate: NOS-4R2) and takes them to the candy-cane netherworld he calls Christmasland. Our heroine is brittle-as-ice Vic McQueen, an almost-victim of Manx who has her own mythical mode of transport.

Joe Hill’s third novel is his most ambitious yet, a complex and sprawling fantasy horror that plays with time and structure, language and genre without losing the emotional core which anchored his previous work. If his chilling ghost story Heart-Shaped Box was broadly linear and his heart-tugging Horns was roughly circular then NOS4R2 is a pyramid of whorls, taking two steps forward and one step back, slowly drawing together a melee of characters and sweeping them steadily and purposefully towards a pinnacle.

If it's reminiscent of the author’s father, Stephen King, it's less Christine and more wide-reaching works like IT that it channels (and references) - though Hill's own style is distinct. A thrilling journey, which should cement Hill as one of the most exciting drivers of horror fiction today.

Rosie Fletcher twitter.com/TotalFilm_Rosie

Read more of our book reviews .

SFX Magazine is the world's number one sci-fi, fantasy, and horror magazine published by Future PLC. Established in 1995, SFX Magazine prides itself on writing for its fans, welcoming geeks, collectors, and aficionados into its readership for over 25 years. Covering films, TV shows, books, comics, games, merch, and more, SFX Magazine is published every month. If you love it, chances are we do too and you'll find it in SFX.