When he was in Big Black, Steve Albini once said something (and I'm paraphrasing here) about how most bands fall back onto little signifiers of brutality, rather than trying to create a genuine sense of physicality and impact. This observation has always stuck with me, because I think it's an eloquent summation of a phenomenon you see absolutely everywhere.
With enough repetition, even the most outlandish aesthetics can become rote; consider how something like death metal—a musical style that would've been inconceivably harsh to earlier generations—can become surprisingly boring in the wrong hands. What once sounded sickeningly brutal becomes irredeemably silly, and vocals that were once frighteningly demonic are refined into the sound of a guy burping.
GIS for "90s comics", third result.
The biggest problem with NOS4A2 is very simple: it takes for granted that it's a Modern Horror Classic without ever doing the work necessary to become one. And since it is a horror story, this problem is most glaring when it comes to the villain. From the beginning, the book treats Charles Manx like a horror icon akin to the Joker or Hannibal Lecter, but he never actually rises above monster-of-the-week material.
Hannibal Lecter isn't scary because he eats people: he's scary because he's a well-respected genius with a highly-deveoped sense of culture and etiquette—who also eats people. The Joker isn't scary because he blows things up and kills people with poison gas, but because sometimes the things he says make a terrible kind of sense, leaving us wondering if it's true that the only thing separating him from us is one bad day.
But cardboard cutouts aren't very scary once you get past the initial shock. There's a reason why characters like Freddy Krueger, Jason and Chucky were all eventually played for laughs. People still get worked up over H.P. Lovecraft because the horror in his stories cannot be easily translated into cut-and-paste cliche, which is also why so many strict imitations of Lovecraft are so shitty—the idea of a profoundly indifferent cosmos is hard to fit into a rubber suit. (Of course, this hasn't stopped the Cthulhu plush industry from thriving.)
Unfathomable hate beyond time and space.
NOS4A2 isn't all bad. Vic McQueen is a decent character, largely because she exhibits the kind of complexity so lacking in the book's horror elements. Her combustible mix of decency and self-destruction is very human, and it makes her seem like more than another Final Girl from central casting. And the book's magical bikes and enchanted Scrabble tiles have a warmly nostalgic energy, recalling the way we invest such objects with power and potency as children.
But a lot of the time, NOS4A2 feels like an interesting piece of magical realism that got waylaid by a mediocre horror movie. Some of the early scenes when Vic is young crackle, and when she meets Maggie it seems like a whole new world is about to open up. But it doesn't, because it's been too long since we've been reminded that we're Making Christmas Scary™.
Note: this is not quite as fresh an idea as the book seems to think it is. See also: Black Christmas, Rare Exports, etc.
Did you see Insidious? It's a good movie, with some real standout moments. But I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that the best part was the ending. For some, the ending is acceptable; for others, it nearly ruins the movie. (This piece only goes so far as to argue that it "makes sense", not that it's good.)
But it's nobody's favorite part, because it tries way too hard and lays on the "creepiness"—again, not real creepiness, but Little Signifiers of creepiness—way too thick. That's exactly what happens in NOS4A2, but it happens constantly throughout the whole book instead of just boiling over at the end. It's never scary, just numbing.
Like any well-articulated genre, horror runs on the clever revision of cliche. This can often tend toward the postmodern (e.g. Scream, The Cabin in the Woods), but it can just as easily be done with great sincerity: Insidious director James Wan has made a career out of creating horror films that pay homage to the classics while adding his own gloss, and doing so with a lot of love for the genre and a lot of heart.
What sucks about NOS4A2 is that Joe Hill can do this, and do it well—but here, he just doesn't.
My favorite scene in Horns involved an encounter with a stray cat at midnight, which is about as stock a horror setup as you can find. But Hill didn't just toss these elements together and call it a day: he carefully and methodically painted a scene with them, and the result was a powerful, almost numinous sense of something dark and terrible irrupting into the everyday world. It's the same feeling you get from "At the Mountains of Madness" or the climactic scene in Ringu—and unfortunately, nothing in NOS4A2 comes close.
In this case, a picture is worth 175,000 words (conservative estimate).
All these problems would still exist if NOS4A2 was a lean, tightly edited novel of the same length as Horns or Heart Shaped Box, both of which are around 400 pages. Unfortunately for the reader, NOS4A2 weighs in at a terminally bloated 700, which just makes all of its faults that much more glaring.
I read that there's even a novella-length segment that was cut from the final draft, and which is restored in the special edition published by Subterranean Press (which admittedly has a really cool cover). As NOS4A2 character Lou Carmody might say: dude, seriously?
But with all that said, I still think Mr. Hill is a great writer who has a long and storied career in front of him. I just think that once all of his books are written, NOS4A2 is going to be like the ending of Insidious: nobody's favorite.
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