Joe Hill takes a cheery little Oedipal swipe at his father in the acknowledgment pages of his throat-grabbing new novel, “NOS4A2.” He describes the two of them riding back roads on motorcycles, Mr. Hill on his Triumph. His father, “a Harley snob,” admires the Triumph but says its engine reminds him of a sewing machine.

“I guess I have been cruising his back roads my whole life,” Mr. Hill writes. “I don’t regret it.” This is a nice way of saying that his father, Stephen King, writes horror novels but that he, Joseph Hillstrom King, has the brass to write them too.

And to do it excitingly well. This novel, his third, is a much bigger book than the earlier ones, though “Heart-Shaped Box” (2007) was as full of uncanny assurance as uncanny tricks. (It was followed by “Horns” in 2010.) This time Mr. Hill envisions an epic battle between real and imaginary worlds, makes this fight credible and creates a heroine who can recklessly crash from one realm to the other. She is a brave biker chick named Vic McQueen, who rides a Triumph, of course. When she says “Come on, honey” as the story goes into high gear, she’s talking to that bike.

“NOS4A2,” as in “Nosferatu,” F. W. Murnau’s classic vampire movie, loves playing with words. The book’s villain is a wizened ghoul who tries to lure children to a place where it is always Christmas, with fun features like a Sleigh House, and you don’t have to be Cassandra to know there’s something nasty about that. And “NOS4A2” is not really a vampire story, anyway; Mr. Hill’s imagination is much more far-ranging than that. Which is scarier: bloodsucking vampires or the unexpected sound of treacly Christmas music suddenly playing in the summer? Mr. Hill gets maximum chills by invoking tunes like “A Holly Jolly Christmas.” He also names the book’s ugliest character Bing.