NOS4A2

NOS4A2 is a horror novel by Joe Hill, published in 2013. Its title is pronounced Nosferatu, the book has since been adapted for television, and the story is about a woman trying to keep her son away from a supernatural killer.

Vic McQueen is eight when she works out that the covered bridge near her home in Massachusetts does something impossible: if she rides through it on her bicycle thinking about an object she has lost, she arrives at the place where that object can be found. The ability is useful and it is also expensive, because each journey through the bridge takes a lasting toll on her body and on her mind, and she spends years inventing excuses for how she finds things. Her travels bring her into contact with a man who uses a similar route to find children, and the novel follows her from childhood into adulthood as she tries to protect her own son from him.

Hill writes horror that leans on a particularly American landscape of old cars, small towns and long drives in bad weather, and his interest is in the damage the survivors carry afterwards as much as in the monster.