Review: NOS4A2’s second season is a satisfying, genuinely scary horror story

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  Vic McQueen (Ashleigh Cummings) has a good thing going with Lou Carmody (Jonathan Langdon). [credit: AMC ]

A young mother must overcome her personal demons to save her son from a psychic vampire in the second season of AMC horror drama NOS4A2 (pronounced "Nosferatu"), an adaptation of the 2013 novel of the same name by Joe Hill. (Hill is having a banner year between this and the successful Netflix adaptation of Locke and Key). While the otherwise compelling first season dragged in places-mostly when it was weighed down a bit by the need to build out the fictional world-S2 wastes no time kicking off the action. NOS4A2 rarely lets up over its newest ten episodes.

(Spoilers for S1 below. Mostly mild spoilers for S2 until after the final gallery. We'll give you a heads up when we get there.)

As we've reported previously, the 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; 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, which seems to have a mind of its own.

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