I’ve been in love with Joe Hill’s writing since I stumbled upon the Locke & Key comic book series a few years ago. When my brother’s girlfriend got into Stephen King and expressed an interest in reading some of Joe Hill’s stuff, I decided to get her this book as a selfish Christmas present last year, so I could borrow it once she was done.
I picked up this book last month, thinking it would be a good Halloween read, but it turned out to be a better Christmas read, especially if you want to add some horror to your Christmas season.
SPOILERS! I’m about to spoil this book big time, so if you haven’t read it and you care about spoilers, I suggest you stop here.
The book shifts perspectives between characters a fair amount, but the main character is a woman named Victoria (Vic) McQueen. She’s only about eight years old when we first meet her and living with her parents in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Her parents are fighting over a bracelet her mom lost, and at first, Vic rides out on her bike just to escape the fight.
While she’s riding through the woods behind her house, she fantasizes about finding her mom’s lost bracelet. As she approaches a river in the woods behind her house, she sees an old wooden bridge, known as the Shorter Way Bridge, which doesn’t actually exist anymore. It had become so decrepit it had been torn down, but Vic sees it, rides across it, and when she gets to the other side, she finds herself in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, at the burger joint where she and her parents had been vacationing. Vic wanders into the restaurant, the guy at the register recognizes her, figures she must be there for her mom’s bracelet, and hands it over. Vic takes it, hops on her bike, and rides back across the bridge to Haverhill Massachusetts, where she delivers the bracelet, telling her parents she found it in the car. But magic has a price and Vic gets so sick after using the Shorter Way Bridge she passes out and has to spend the next day or so resting in bed.
Throughout her childhood, Vic uses the bridge to find lost things a little over half a dozen times. She makes up stories about how she finds these things instead of telling the truth because she knows she would sound crazy.
When Vic is 17, she asks the bridge to take her to someone who can prove she’s not crazy and she ends up in Here, Iowa with a young librarian with a stutter who has been expecting Vic because her Scrabble tiles told her Vic was coming.
Maggie, the librarian, takes Vic into her office, pulls out some scrabble tiles, and rearranges them until they form a coherent thought. At one point, the tiles tell Maggie that Vic can find the Wraith, but when Vic asks about it, Maggie says Vic doesn’t want to know.
So, of course, Vic goes looking for the Wraith. Not right away, but after her dad has moved out of the house, taken up with another woman, and Vic (who blames her mom for her dad leaving) has had a particularly bad fight with her mom. Vic takes off to find the Wraith and ends up biting off a bit more than she can chew. She finds herself in the mountains of Colorado, outside a cabin in the woods, surrounded by trees decorated with Christmas ornaments, even though it’s spring. An old Rolls Royce sits in the garage, and a small boy sits in the back seat of the car.
Vic tries to get the kid out of the car, but she can’t get the door open, and when she reaches in to try to pull the kid through the window, he grabs her arm and screams to Mr. Manx that he has her. His skin is so cold it burns her, but she manages to get away as the garage door is opening. She runs the only direction she can, into the house.
Vic finds the oven on and a TV dinner cooking in there. She throws some towels on top of the TV dinner and leaves the oven open a crack. It’s unclear whether she plans to start a fire, or if she’s just acting on instinct. Either way it backfires because Manx is out front and the creepy kid is at the back door trying to get in, leaving Vic trapped in a house that is soon on fire. She locks herself in the pantry to get away from Manx, which turns out to be a literal case of leaping out of the frying pan and into the fire as Manx overturns a fridge and uses it to block the pantry doors before leaving the house to burn with Vic inside.
But the pantry has access to the laundry chute, which leads up to the second floor and Vic is skinny enough to fit in the chute so she climbs up it, down the stairs, and out of the burning house. She doesn’t stop running until she hits the road and manages to flag down a young guy on a motorcycle and convince him to take her somewhere they can call the cops.
They end up at a gas station and tell the owner, along with some customers, that there’s a man in the woods holding at least one child hostage. When Manx shows up, two of the customers volunteer to go out and arrest him, but they’re no match for Manx and his magic car. One guy ends up burned alive and the other manages to knock Manx out by whacking him on the head with a fire extinguisher, which he then uses to put out the fire that the other guy has become.
Manx ends up convicted of kidnapping a minor (Vic) and transporting her across state lines, as well as the murder of the guy he killed at the gas station. Because it’s crazy to believe that a magical bridge shows up only when you want to find things and takes you anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, Vic convinces herself (and everyone else) that Manx kidnapped her in Massachusetts, trapped her in the trunk of his car, and brought her to Colorado.
She ends up hooking up with the guy on the motorcycle who saved her, Lou Carmody, who happens to be a hugely overweight geek. Vic knows she’s way out of his league, and she doesn’t plan for sleeping with him to turn into a relationship, but it does and he’s really good to her and they have a kid together named Bruce Wayne (I told you Lou is a huge geek), but they call him Wayne.
Fast forward a few years and Vic starts getting phone calls from creepy children saying they want her to come play with them in Christmasland. The phone is always so cold it burns when these children call and no one else ever hears the phone ring – just Vic.
She starts to avoid phones as much as possible, and one day she takes all the phones in the house, puts them in the oven, turns the oven as high as it will go to melt the phones, but she forgets the phones, leaves the house, gets very drunk, and steals a bike from a window display.
That little performance gets her into rehab and then a psych ward. She’s just getting her life back together when Manx dies in prison, but then his body goes missing, along with a hammer called a bone mallet.
Of course Manx is not dead, even though the doctor had started doing his autopsy. He gets his car back, his henchman, and sets out to get revenge on the woman who “told lies” about him and put him in jail.
Manx takes umbrage at the idea that he would ever do anything inappropriate with a child. He’s not a pedophile, just a kind of a vampire who takes children to Christmasland (a magical land he’s made up in his mind and manages to access using his Rolls Royce just like Vic can access different places with her bike) where he feeds on their life force. The thing is Manx honestly believes he’s helping these children and he’s not technically wrong about Vic telling the court lies about him, because he did not trap her in a trunk or kidnap her. But he never denies killing that guy at the gas station.
Manx shows up at Vic’s house when Vic has stepped out for literally five minutes. Wayne is 10 or 12 at this point, so it’s not inconceivable that she would leave him on his own for a short period of time. She just happens to have really bad luck that Manx chooses this moment to drive up, kill their dog, and kidnap her son. Vic gets back before Manx drives off with Wayne, but his henchman shoots at Vic, who manages to hide in the lake behind her house and narrowly avoid getting shot. The bad news is Manx is able to drive off with Wayne and Vic has to try to figure out how to get him back.
Of course she calls the police and tells them what happened, but they’re just like, “Yeah, Charles Manx died in prison. They did his autopsy. There’s no way he took your kid. Also, no one can find a black Rolls Royce and there are only a few hundred of those in the world, so we’re pretty sure you’re lying and did something to your kid, what with your history of addiction and mental instability.”
They’re about to arrest Vic after she did something really stupid because of course they’re tapping all your phones, Vic! But Vic manages to escape their clutches and ride out on her newly rehabilitated motorcycle, which just happens to give her access to the Shorter Way Bridge just like her childhood bicycle did.
The rest of the book goes back and forth between Wayne’s perspective of what’s happening to him in the car and Vic trying to track him down until the final showdown in Christmasland.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can’t wait to read more of Hill’s stuff.