About This Book
Victoria McQueen has always been able to find things — lost objects, hidden truths, shortcuts through reality itself. Charles Manx has a gift too: he collects children, ferrying them in his vintage Rolls-Royce to a place called Christmasland, where the holidays never end and the kids never quite stay human. When Vic's path crosses Manx's as a teenager, she survives. But survival isn't the same as escape, and decades later, with a son of her own, the past comes roaring back down roads that shouldn't exist. Joe Hill builds a horror story that's also, at its core, about the cost of imagination — what it gives you and what it takes.
Hill writes with a novelist's patience and a born storyteller's instinct for dread, letting his 700-page canvas breathe without ever losing tension. The book earns its length through character — Vic is one of horror fiction's more fully realized protagonists, flawed and stubborn and real in ways that make the supernatural stakes land harder. Hill draws freely on the genre's mythology while bending it into something distinctly his own: the horror here is ornate, almost baroque, but it never loses its teeth.
