AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

You may have missed AMC's evocative new horror series, NOS4A2, in the jumble of hotly anticipated movies and TV series over the past few months. It has largely flown under the radar in terms of media coverage, but this haunting fable of the high cost of supernatural gifts won over sufficient fans for AMC to already approve a second season—one week before the show's two-part season one finale aired.

(Some spoilers for the novel and series below.)

The series is an adaption of the 2013 award-winning horror novel of the same name by Joe Hill. Hill comes by his horror chops naturally; his dad is some obscure novelist named Stephen King. (Hill also created the fantastic comic book series, Locke and Key, about a mysterious Keyhouse filled with portals to other dimensions that can be opened by various keys. The beleaguered TV adaption project for that series is now with Netflix.)

NOS4A2, Hill's third novel, is about a woman named Vic McQueen with a gift for finding lost things. She's one of a rare group of people known as "strong creatives," capable of tearing through the fabric that separates the physical world from the world of thought and imagination (their personal "inscapes") with the help of a talisman-like object dubbed a "knife." For Vic, her knife is her motorcycle (a bicycle when she's younger); for a troubled young woman named Maggie, it's a bag of Scrabble tiles. And for psychic "vampire"/child abductor Charlie Manx, it's a 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith.

Manx must feed off the souls of children, transforming them into little monsters.

But there's a cost to using their creative gifts: Maggie stutters, Vic's eye weeps blood, and Manx? Well, he wields his power at the cost of his soul. In order to maintain his youthful appearance, he must "feed" off the souls of the kidnapped children, transforming them into little monsters and trapping what's left of them in a dimension in his imagination called Christmasland. The novel moves back and forth between multiple time periods: Vic as a young girl in 1986, Vic as a rebellious teenager in 1996, and an older Vic with a son in 2008 and 2012. Naturally Manx eventually targets her son, and Vic must defeat him once and for all to save the boy—at great personal cost.

The first trailer for the NOS4A2 series dropped in March, with Australian actress Ashleigh Cummings playing Vic. (Fans of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries might recognize her as Phryne's paid companion, Dot.) The adaption takes a similar approach to the latest film adaption of Stephen King's IT, dividing the timelines in Hill's sprawling novel so that the first season focused on Vic's teen years and her first showdown with Charlie Manx (Zachary Quinto).

All the key elements are here: Manx and his Wraith; kidnapped children slowly turning into monsters with rows of deadly teeth and a fondness for playing Scissors for the Drifter; Vic's ability to access the so-called Shorter Way Bridge on her motorbike; Maggie (Jahkara Smith) and her Scrabble tiles; the alcoholic father, Chris McQueen (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who is prone to violence against Vic's mother, Linda (Virgina Kull); and Bing Partridge (Olafur Darri Olafsson), a mentally challenged janitor who helps Manx kidnap the children, believing they will be happy forever in Christmasland.

Heading for a showdown

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

AMC

The novel's major narrative set pieces remain intact, too, with only minor tweaks. But television is a very different medium, so show runner Jami O'Brien also deviates from the book in several ways, typically involving new characters and fleshed-out backstories. Most of these deviations work very well, such as the introduction of a drive-in waitress named Jolene (Judith Roberts), another strong creative—her knife is her roller skates—and former love interest of Manx from the 1950s. She rebuffed him, and Manx took his revenge by taking away her skates, but Vic encounters the elderly Jolene in a psych ward in the present day. She soon learns Jolene has just enough power left to play a small but vital part in the fight against Manx.

The pacing requirements of a TV series also dictated some changes. For instance, the novel didn't take us to Manx's Christmasland inscape until the final confrontation with Vic at the very end, whereas we catch glimpses of it a couple of times earlier in the series—and it's a near-perfect recreation of Hill's description in the book.

The weakest addition is an elaborate subplot of Vic's desire to study art at the Rhode Island School of Design, complete with a wealthy circle of friends who take their eventual college education for granted. A romantic triangle between Vic, her childhood friend Craig (Dalton Harrod), and a privileged trust fund kid is especially tedious. I get that it's intended to highlight the class-based tensions, but it just doesn't add much value to an already richly textured series. Yet on the whole, this is a tightly focused 10-episode arc. Aspects that seem to be indulgently superfluous early on generally turn out to have a purpose after all.

"Most strong creatives are crippled before they ever reach their full potential."

Cummings, Moss-Bachrach, and Kull shine as the dysfunctional members of the McQueen family, playing off each other in an intricate emotional dance as they wrestle with their personal demons and deep-seated fears. All three are fully fleshed-out characters, with strengths, flaws, insecurities, and vulnerabilities, and their love for one another shines through even in the midst of the inevitable clashes. That's not something you always find in the horror genre, but it's one of the major strengths of Hill's novel, and it's nice to see it captured so well in the TV adaption. Quinto is appropriately menacing as Manx, even if he's given less to do in terms of emotional range. And the seemingly sweet-tempered Bing turns out to be just as terrifying once his true nature is revealed.

Like Hill's novel, NOS4A2 is as much a depiction of the potentially destructive nature of artistic gifts as it is about the tragedy of dreams deferred—just all draped in supernatural trappings. "Most strong creatives are crippled before they ever reach their full potential," Manx tells Vic when they meet in person for the first time in a bus station.

That's true for most of the characters in NOS4A2, especially those hailing from the poorer side of the tracks. No doubt Linda McQueen had dreams before she got pregnant and married Chris; Chris probably had dreams, too. He repeatedly tells his daughter, "Don't get married. Don't have kids," urging Vic to pursue her art school dreams lest she end up like them, trapped in a small town with few prospects. And in Manx's twisted mind, he is "saving" the children he has kidnapped from adult lives of quiet desperation. They get to stay forever young (albeit monstrous) in Christmasland instead. At one point, he takes Bing to the Graveyard of What Might Be, filled with the souls of children frozen in ice—children from what he perceives to be neglected or abusive homes who must be "rescued."

Ultimately this is what makes Manx a compelling villain: however twisted he might be, he has genuine affection for the children he has imprisoned in his inscape. He even briefly considers Vic as a potential "mother" for them, until he discovers she is not as pure as he believed. Vic herself is having none of it, naturally. "I'm the only one with the power to stop him, and I'm going to burn Christmasland to the ground," she vows. We'll have to wait for season two to see if she can fulfill that vow.

Listing image by AMC