The Hill Holes

Having finally finished Joe Hill's Nosferatu, I'm afraid I'm rather disappointed. The plot was simple enough to begin with--the good guys had to stop the bad guys who were preying on children and killing adults--but there were so many non-plausible events that the story became pretty ridiculous and annoying by the end. Spoiler alert here! There were many logic holes, I'm afraid. One in particular was the blowing up of Christmasland, the place where all the kidnapped kids were taken, which would have made sense except that Christmasland didn't exist in real terms--it was a place in the mind. How can you blow up a place in the mind? Makes no sense.

And then the children who were being held in Christmasland appeared as real children after the place had been blown up. That too would have made sense (if you accept that such a thing could occur) except that the children had been kidnapped over many years' time, and many would not still have been children by then. In fact, some would have been quite elderly. This logic gap was not dealt with either.

Many of the children were helping the bad guys kill people. But where were they when they weren't with the bad guys? If Christmasland wasn't a real place, where did they live? Also, there was the idea that the Christmas angels that hung on the enormous tree in a real place held the souls of all the children and when the good guys smashed the angels, the children's souls were released and they could stop feeling murderous.  But . . . oh, never mind. I just didn't get this whole idea and it's because the writer did not make it clear.

Joe Hill should really stick to a simpler plot structure so that whatever we need to believe in will be easy to believe in. I don't recommend this book, I'm afraid, and I'm going to be skeptical about future novels by Stephen King's son. It's early in his career--he shouldn't be getting lazy yet, but that seems to be what happened with this book.