It’s ironic that NOS4A2, the book that will in all likelihood be Joe Hill’s breakthrough to superstardom, is also the first book in which he’s gone all-in with acknowledging his way-above-average literary genes.

Hill, the 40-year-old son of author Stephen King, uses a shortened version of his middle name (Hillstrom) and for several years didn’t tell anyone his identity as the progeny of one of the world’s best-selling authors. He “came out” in 2007 after folks started figuring it out.

By then, Hill had already received awards for his short stories and comics and had won the prestigious Bram Stoker Award for his collection, 20th Century Ghosts. Two novels followed, Heart-Shaped Box in 2007 (that one made it to The New York Times’ best-seller list) and Horns in 2010. While those works contained elements of horror and fantasy, they were heavily symbolic examples of those genres, mostly bereft of the down-and-dirty terror of most of King’s work.

Not so with NOS4A2, whose vampire-referencing title (just keep saying it and you’ll figure it out) is the vanity license plate of its villain, Charles Talent Manx.

A ghastly, not-quite-human specter with a vile sense of humor, Manx trolls for children in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith and then spirits them away to an “amusement park” called Christmasland, where every day is Christmas and unhappy thinking is simply not tolerated. It’s an overly decorated holiday phantasm, complete with evil elves, teeth dripping blood and gore, and everything twisty and convoluted, as though seen in a funhouse mirror: Christmas à la Salvador Dalí.

It’s all well and good if you don’t mind being kidnapped, leaving all your loved ones behind and living in the gruesome construct of Manx’s mind, which somehow becomes physically manifest. Oh, and growing rows of tiny hooks where your teeth used to be. Manx is a vampire, all right, but he feeds on souls rather than blood.

Hill’s protagonist, Victoria “Brat” McQueen, like Manx, has a particular talent, hers seemingly benign: She can find things. Aboard her trusty Raleigh Tuff Burner bicycle, she can cross the Shorter Way Bridge near her home (even after the bridge has long been demolished) and be transported to the land of the lost. Her mother’s bracelet? She lands at the diner where it was left behind. Her innocence? Manx’s home, the Sleigh House, where he nearly killed her as a teenager.

As Vic grows up, she follows a path of addiction, rehab and the psych ward, finally convincing herself that her Tuff Burner journeys and Manx were all a product of her sick imagination. Then Manx reappears and kidnaps Vic’s son, and she heads back onto the Shorter Way in a reckless frenzy.

Not only does Hill acknowledge his dad’s influence here, he gleefully drops little Easter eggs throughout for his father’s fans. You’ll find a reference to Pennywise, the horrific clown from It, among others, and that Wraith can trace its lineage right back to the nasty Plymouth in King’s Christine. Yet Hill is very much his own writer, at least as talented as King and a smidge more literary in his approach. He takes his time building to the epic horror that awaits in the book’s final third (and by then, trust me, you won’t be going to sleep anytime soon).

As an ardent King fan, I’ve long fretted about what I’ll do for my horror fix when he stops writing. Now I’m not worried at all — we’ve found King’s perfect successor in Hill. In 20 or 30 years, when people talk about Stephen King, for many younger horror fans it’ll be as “oh, yeah, that writer who was Joe Hill’s father.”

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NOS4A2

Joe Hill

(William Morrow, $28.99)

http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130504-book-review-nos4a2-by-joe-hill.ece