Back Jacket Hack Job: NOS4A2

 

www.karissalaurel.com

Hey everyone! Karissa here, and it's my turn to do a Back Jacket Hack Job! Basically, this is a recurring series where one of us rewrites a book's back jacket terribly. 

Since some people think the beginning of September is the beginning of "Spooky Season", and because I just finished reading/listening to NOS4A2, a horror novel by Joe Hill, I decided that would be a great back jacket to hack, especially since I kinda found the real blurb to be a bit misleading.

"If you love horror predicated on myogenetic bad guys and violence against women (especially mothers) and children, then check out this best seller horror novel that got converted to a cancelled TV series on AMC!"~Author , Karissa Laurel

"A book that feels a lot like, but not quite, a Stephen King novel, probably because it was written by Stephen King's son who was clearly influenced by his dad's bibliography." ~Reader, K. Laurel

Victoria McQueen, a deeply flawed woman who spends most of the novel in a state of perpetual denial has an uncanny knack for finding things using a Raleigh Tuff Burner bike and a magical covered bridge (this is a New England novel, obviously, even though Kate Mulgrew will narrate the audio version in a distinctly midwestern accent).  

The bridge eventually takes her to Charles Talent Manx, a soul sucking vampiric creature person who drives a really cool old Rolls Royce Wraith that's a lot like Kit from Knight Rider if Kit were possessed by a demon. You know, kind of like that evil 1958 Plymouth Fury in that one horror novel by that famous horror novel writer guy...I can't remember his name.  Anyway, Charlie Manx likes kids but not in that "kiddie fiddler" kind of way that everyone wrongly accuses him of, and he kidnaps and takes the kids to a perpetual childhood in "Christmasland" (Hint: Christmasland isn't as fun as it sounds). Helping him is the "Gasmask Man", a simple-minded, childlike man who really really hates women, especially "Mommies", and does everything he can to torture and abuse them throughout the book. Fun times.

Manx sees Victoria as a threat and tries to do bad things to her, but Victoria manages to escape and spends decades dealing, poorly, with the emotional trauma of her magical abilities and her near-death run-in with Manx and Gasmask Man. She has some good times, even manages to fall in love with a wonderful cinnamon roll of a man, and she writes some successful children's novels (that sound so cool they should exist in real life), but literal demons from her past haunt her into near insanity, and her life starts falling apart.

Eventually she and Manx and Gasmask Man have their final showdown when Manx, still pissed that Victoria got away from him all those years ago, comes to seek his revenge. She puts on her big girl panties long enough to get stabbed, burned, beaten, and broken a whole lot before she finally goes Grinch all over Manx's Christmasland.