AMC aired the season 1 premiere of NOS4A2 on Sunday night following the season premiere of Fear the Walking Dead and it caught the attention of Stephen King.
Sure, King is the father of Joe Hill, the author of the novel the show is based on, but he is also the Master of Horror and knows what makes something scary.
The first episode of NOS4A2 wasn’t scary, per se, but it was very unsettling and extremely disturbing. That makes King very happy.
NOS4A2: Scary? Yes. Involving? Yes. But it's also doing something network TV can't or won't do–showing working-class people doing their jobs and trying their damndest (sometimes failing) to be decent. The best horror stories are firmly wedded to real life.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 3, 2019
King is 100 percent right in this assessment.
The lead character is Vic McQueen, a girl whose parents live on the “wrong side of town,” her dad spending most of his time working on his motorcycle when he isn’t working his grinding job, and her mom cleaning houses of the more affluent people in town for a living.
Her mother also has given up on life, allowing domestic abuse into her life while constantly fighting with her husband, and also showing Vic that she has given up and her daughter should consider the same, choosing a life as a house cleaner over college.
It is a sad life that Vic lives, but things are about to get worse as the evil energy vampire Charlie Manx has targeted Vic and is about to invade her life, putting her and everyone she loves in immense danger.
She also has the supernatural ability to bring an old demolished bridge back to life and use it to travel anywhere in the country when she needs to find lost items (The Shorter Way).
As for Joe Hill, himself, he seems excited to see his novel on the small screen — especially since he has been trying to get his comic book series Locke & Key on to television for years now. Locke & Key will finally come to Netflix in the near future.
“When a writer talks about having their story adapted, they say the same cliche things,” Hill told ComicBook.com. “But it’s all true. It’s just incredibly thrilling to see all this stuff you lived with in your imagination suddenly set before you.”
NOS4A2 airs every Sunday night on AMC at 10/9c.