AMC’s NOS4A2 blasts back onto UK screens on July 7th with a thrilling second season, pitching young mother Vic McQueen against Christmas-loving vampire Charlie Manx whilst trying to save her son. Nick Joy caught up with the source novel’s author, Joe Hill, who shares his enthusiasm for the new 10-episode run, how he’s spending lockdown, and what is was like being babysat by Tom Savini.

 

Hi Joe, it’s the inevitable question that we all ask at the moment, but how are you doing, and are you keeping safe?

I’ve managed to stay healthy so far. I’ve been at home for four months now. The last professional obligation that brought me out of the house was C2E2, a big comic convention in Chicago, and when I went there were about 14 known cases of coronavirus in America. I had some concerns, but I was Guest of Honour and I said I would be there, so I decided to take the risk. I probably shook 800 hands and took 800 selfies while I was there – I was in the crowd all the time. But I came home healthy. Now it looks like there were 14 known cases but also 2,000 unknown cases, and Chicago was one of the hotspots. I got lucky.

What with your novel The Fireman and your dad’s (Stephen King’s) The Stand, a case could be made that the King boys have got pandemics covered.

Well, I think the first thing about coronavirus is that it’s not Captain Trips and it’s not Dragonscale. Wear a mask, try not to do stuff indoors in large social settings, try to stay home if you can, and you’ll be fine. A lot of people who have got it have not been made badly ill by it.

Let’s jump into Season Two of NOS4A2, which I’ve really been enjoying. I’ve seen the first five episodes and it’s such a confident show this year. Is this something you share?

I think it’s an enormous leap on the first season. I think the first season is really fun and thoughtful, terrifically scary in places, animated by some terrific performances by Zachary Quinto, Ashleigh Cummings and Jahkara Smith. That first season is an origin story and origin stories by their nature do a lot of explaining.

The second season is a different beast altogether. It starts at 70 miles per hour and never slows down. By the time it gets to episodes four and five, it’s moving like a rocket. It’s much more tense, it has an amplified sense of menace.

We have a number of characters who have supernatural powers. We’ve got Charlie Manx with his 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith, which makes him invulnerable and opens the door to this terrifying other world, Christmasland. We have Vic, who has a beat-up 1970 Triumph Bonneville which she can use to leap through space to find lost objects. There are a few other characters with supernatural gifts, and all of them are in the full flush of their powers. They know what the stakes are.

Vic knows how dangerous Charlie Manx is and they’re going at it hammer and tongs from the first episode, straight out. I think that’s exciting. The comparison I make is the leap that was made between the first Terminator picture and the second Terminator picture. I love the first Terminator picture – it’s great and is the cornerstone of that series – but the second one raised the bar in terms of suspense, action, characterisation. In every way it was a more richer piece of storytelling.

And that spectacle wouldn’t work if Ashleigh wasn’t so good in the role of Vic, would it? She’s really had to grow up this year.

The book was the story of a young woman’s life – the first steps of a young lady as a woman in Season 1, to a young mother in Season 2. We’ve leapt forward eight years in time, and the woman we meet in the first episode is tatted up and with those tattoos the ink is a sort of a visual armour for a person who is pretty damaged beneath it. Vic in some ways relishes the idea of going to war with Charlie Manx. The best thing that could happen to her is for Charlie to kill her, cos that way she could die a hero, instead of facing the fact that as a mother and the partner of a good man she’s really struggling. She’s finding out that a lot of stuff that she couldn’t stand about her own parents is embedded deep in her own psyche, and that those familial failings have a tendency to echo down the generations. It terrifies her and gives her a terrible self-image. Her internal demons in some ways are at least as destructive as Charlie Manx.

When I first heard that a TV series was being made of the book, I prayed that the first season would be good enough to earn a second year, just because the second half of the novel is my favourite.

The funny thing is that when I was writing the book I got to this place where Vic goes from being a child to being a teenager, and it’s in her teenage years where she gets to grips with Charlie Manx. There was this sequence where she battled with him in his house, the Sleigh House, which is the last waypoint before Christmasland, and she only barely escapes him. And then we think it’s over and she gets to a gas station for help and he turns up there and there’s another battle. At the end of that battle I thought to myself ‘Oh my God, I don’t think I’m even halfway through this book. I think it just got started!’ And in some ways that’s true – as a novel, it had one beginning and you read 250 pages, and then it begins again with this whole other second novel there. The second season is the second novel.

Was there a commitment from AMC for two seasons right from the off, or did the did the first one have to prove itself?

I think that was always [showrunner] Jami O’Brien’s plan as well. She was very brave to take that risk, because if the first season had failed we’d have half an adaptation, and now we’re in the position of having adapted the whole book and also expanded on the world of the book so it’s possible to have more if viewers want it. And if viewers don’t want it, well, we had two great seasons.

I define ‘great’ as artistically coherent, emotionally engaging – we enjoyed and loved the characters and we cared about the situations we found them in from beginning to end. We hope it will also be a commercial success, but that is a different matter, because you never know what will succeed. The Princess Bride bombed when it went into theatres, and the most popular TV show in the world is a game show called The Floor is Lava. It has to be one of the stupidest things ever made – I love it, and watch every episode. It makes American Gladiators look like Downton Abbey!

In this season’s second episode we get to see Charlie’s origins story. As a writer, how important was it to not make his plight too sympathetic?

Charlie was my first really successful villain. I had a couple of books that I was really happy with before NOS4A2, but the villains are bad bad guys. They are embodiments of evil, and it’s hard to imagine how that person became that person.

Charlie’s different. Charlie is evil, he does evil things to people and has enabled other people to do cruel, terrifying things to other human beings, but I felt with Charlie that I’d done something I’d never done before up till then. I could imagine a version of the story where Charlie was the hero.

Charlie can tell himself a story. When Charlie looks in the mirror and thinks about the way he’s lived his life, Charlie has a version of his story inside him where he’s the hero, he’s the main character. After all, he has spent his entire life saving children from abusive, tragic, hopeless homes and brought them to a place where every night is Christmas Eve and every day is Christmas Day. They know nothing but innocence, happiness and fun.

It’s hard when you put it that way not to feel like he’s The Punisher. He punishes the wicked and rescues the innocent. There are complicating factors to this story though. One of the complicating factors is who decided that the homes they were in were hopeless homes? That they are doomed to tragedy. Charlie seems to be a guy who’s pretty judgmental. A woman is essentially wicked and sinful the moment she begins to have a sexual life. To Charlie, women are inherently grubby and unpleasant at a certain point. His own modus is to rescuing children – they keep him young by draining their souls, that’s how he’s a vampire – but he’s hardly doing this out of pure benevolence. If you can fashion a villain, who in a twisted version of the world is the hero, you probably landed on something that has power in it.

I’d also throw out there that in the book that follows NOS4A2 the bad guy in the story is essentially a dark version of the guy in the cowboy hat in The Walking Dead. If you look at the world from his point of view, he is the hero killing the zombies. It’s just that in the world of The Fireman the zombies are all people we love.

And taking that one step further, Charlie’s henchman Bing just wants too please Charlie so that he can go to Christmasland.

The terrible things that Bing does to adults he can justify on the grounds that these people are not worth their feelings. The pain that he causes them – they had it all coming because they were abusive to their kids, in the same way that Bing himself was abused as a child. But is that true? Were those parents really as abusive as Bing is led to believe? Hmmmmm, probably not! But Bing has his story, and it’s good enough for Bing.

And he’s fantastically cast in that role.

Olafur (Dari Olafsson) is great. He’s terrific. Very frightening and tragic.

What with Locke and Key, NOS4A2, Creepshow and In the Tall Grass, there’s a lot of Joe Hill adaptations at the moment. Was this all part of your plan, or a lucky convergence of projects?

I think you’re correct. I think I’ve peaked now… and there’s nothing to look forward to. Probably the exact peak was the second episode of Season 2 of NOS4A2, and from here on in it’s a slide into irrelevance, self-recrimination, disappointment. Pretty soon I’ll be going to conventions – if we ever have conventions again – and I’ll be sitting behind a table and someone will go ‘Who’s that?’ And someone will say ‘He had a comic, didn’t he? I can’t remember the title. Oh, well.’

Isn’t that the guy that they based one of the Creepshow stories on?

[Laughs] That’s it! ‘That’s Billy from Creepshow! The kid with the voodoo doll!’ Do you guys get the Creepshow series too? It’s a lot of fun.

You guys are about two episodes behind us in the States for NOS4A2 – this week’s includes a cameo by Tom Savini, who was in the original Creepshow and directed one of my stories for Season 1 of Creepshow, By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain, which was itself a story inspired by a book tour I did in the UK. That’s like a snake eating its own tail.

Wasn’t Tom your babysitter on set of the original Creepshow movie?

That’s true. I spent the whole time in his trailer. He had two work tables and I would hang out beneath one of them and watch him garishly disfigure movie stars, which I found fascinating. And when he wasn’t making someone up, I’d listen to whatever music he was into and talk.

At the time – and this will date me, as some of your readers will remember this game – there was this board game called The Awful Green Things From Outer Space and I played that game with myself sitting under his table. I don’t think I was ever successful in enticing him to play with me. He was cool. He was my first rock star.

The scene in the bar where we see Tom is where we first hear about a new character – The Hourglass.

That’s a dark hangout for strong creatives, The Parnassus, and we meet him there and get a little bit of a conversation about The Hourglass. Tom is a character called Old Snake and there’s a hint he’s got powers himself, but it’s not quite clear what they are. I have a couple of notions about them. I wanted to make it clear that all the people at The Parnassus are bad, like Charlie.

How’s your screenplay progressing for the adaptation of The Fireman?

I get a pretty full rewrite of the script that Fox has, and I’m pretty happy with the way it came out – it turned out well. COVID has obviously stopped everything and I don’t know exactly what will happen. I’m certainly very happy with the script we have and would love to see it get made.

Just to wrap things up, are there any other projects lined up you can tell us about?

They recently announced that they are going to be developing Throttle, which is a story I wrote with my dad, and is itself a homage to a great film, Duel, which was directed by Steven Spielberg based on a terrific novella by Richard Matheson. That’s happening, and there’s a couple of other irons in the fire, but I’d really like to get over this hump of COVID so that we can get back to filming Season 2 of Locke and Key. Until cameras are rolling, there’s not much to talk about. Until then, it’s just all chat.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you continue to keep well. I’m really looking forward to watching the rest of the season of NOS4A2 – it’s time for Vic to kick Charlie’s butt!

The last two episodes of Season 2 are some of my favourite things of anything that’s been adapted from my stuff. I think you’re going to enjoy it.

 

NOS4A2 premieres Tuesday 7th July at 9pm on AMC