Literature / NOS4A2

aka: NOS 4 R 2

NOS4A2 is a 2013 horror novel by Joe Hill.

Charlie Manx has built a wonderful place just for children, where it's Christmas every day. Kids get to have the greatest fun in Christmasland, riding the Sleighcoaster, feasting from La Chocolatier, or playing scissors-for-the-drifter. And the fun never ends in Christmasland, where these wonderful children get to stay children — forever.

At 116 years old, Charles Talent Manx has spent decades kidnapping children and taking them to Christmasland, a place built by his imagination in a world that exists somewhere alongside ours. By the time they arrive, they've been... changed. Victoria McQueen also knows how to get to places that aren't quite there, using her Raleigh Tuff Burner bicycle to travel and find things that have been lost. At seventeen, she had a close encounter with Manx and was the first person to escape his grasp. Manx was sent to prison, and Vic was left to cope with a psyche deeply scarred by her encounter. Thirteen years later, Manx escapes and takes his revenge on Vic by "rescuing" her son and bringing him to Christmasland. With her unusual ability to find things, Vic may be the only one who has a chance at saving him.

A comic sequel/prequel, titled Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland and illustrated by Charles Paul Wilson III, has been released.

A television adaptation was made for AMC, which began to air in June 2019 starring Zachary Quinto as Manx and Ashleigh Cummings playing Vic. After two seasons, the series was canceled.

Has nothing to do with NOS-4-A2 from Buzz Lightyear of Star Command.

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NOS4A2 contain examples of:

• Action Mom: The climax sees Vic roaring around Christmasland on a motorcycle and throwing explosives left and right, and then outracing both the devestation and a pursuing Manx with her son behind her on the saddle. Suffice to say, she qualifies for the trope.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Played for tragedy. Wayne tries to love his parents, and sometimes succeeds, but he deeply wishes that his father wasn't so fat, dorky and unsuccessful. Oh, and that his mother wasn't insane.
• Animal Motifs: With his noticeable overbite and narrow, pointed jaw, Manx is said on multiple occasions to have a face and head that bears more than a passing resemblance to a weasel's.
• Anyone Can Die: There is a significant body count among the main characters.
• Artistic License – Chemistry:
  • Vic kills Bing by igniting a tank of sevoflurane anesthetic he is carrying. That compound exists in real life, but is non-flammable.
  • When Bing first meets Manx in person, he describes a workplace accident in which an employee caused a nitrogen tank to explode by smoking near it. Nitrogen is completely non-flammable; a tank of it can only explode if it ruptures or if a valve breaks off.
• Bald of Evil: Charlie Manx, although his hair grows back as he regains his youth.
• Big Beautiful Man: Vic is physically attracted to the obese Lou; she likes the way he smells and the way his body feels against hers.
• Bigger on the Inside: Maggie's Scrabble bag is barely as long as her forearm, but when she wants to pull out some tiles she needs to stick her arm in almost up to her shoulder to reach them. The sight of it predictably weirds out everyone who witnesses it.
• Bittersweet Ending: Vic destroys Christmasland and saves Wayne, and Manx dies for good trying to pursue her afterward. Later, Lou destroys the ornaments that kept the kids trapped in Christmasland and allows them to return to the real world. However, Vic is dead (killed by a combination of a deep stab wound and the mental damage from the Shorter Way collapsing), and some of Manx's children escape.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Manx's children have them.
• Brick Joke: Vic's father tells her in 1986 that the rickety Shorter Way Bridge has finally collapsed after some idiot tried to drive his car over it. At the end of the book, Manx and his car become displaced in time and crash through the bridge.
• Broken Pedestal: Chris, after Vic figures out that her father is a wife beater. This does not improve her opinion of her mother, whom Vic still believes "had it coming."
• Canon Welding: In addition to the Shout-Outs to his father's work, Hill also refers to the Treehouse of the Mind from Horns and Craddock McDermott from Heart-Shaped Box.
• Cast from Hit Points: Using the inscape too often leads to worsening physical or mental problems.
• Central Theme: What does it mean to grow up? What do we lose when we do so? What do we gain? What would it mean to stay young and innocent forever?
• Chekhov's Gun: The bats in the Shorter Way Bridge. Not to mention the gun-shaped paperweight labeled "Property of A. Chekhov" on Maggie's desk in her office at the library. Although the latter doesn't count technically — it doesn't get fired, but it is used by Vic to hold off the police after Maggie's murder.
• Children Are Innocent: Deconstructed.
  Joe Hill: The kids live in an eternal state of innocence, and it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Innocent children like to rip the wings off a butterfly just to watch it flop around, and they will laugh ’cause they don’t know any better. Innocence is ignorance.
• Crapsaccharine World: Christmasland. It looks like a holiday paradise at first, but the kids inhabiting it have become sadistic little demons due to their time with Manx.
• Creepy Child: Manx's children have been warped into hideous monsters by the corrupting influence of NOS4A2 and Christmasland.
• Daddy's Girl: Vic much prefers her father Chris to her mother Linda.
• Deconstruction: Of the Peter Pan story. Manx seems to be convinced he is fulfilling the Peter Pan role, taking children away to a magical land where they will never grow up. However, this is shown to actually be a terrible thing, as the price of staying in Christmasland is the children's souls, and Manx doesn't take them there to help them, as he claims, but actually to maintain his own youth. Vic, meanwhile, is Wendy, who encounters Manx when she is a teenager, and later is forced to confront him in adulthood when he kidnaps her son.
• Dented Iron: Vic accumulates injuries and ailments throughout the novel. Her mental state is severely affected by both using her Inscape and the trauma from her first encounter with Manx. Later one of her knees is damaged to the point where it can't bend, she's in the middle of an explosion that kills Bing, and later one of Charlie's vampire children bites a chunk out of her shoulder. She keeps fighting though, and it takes both being stabbed by a different child and the collapse of her inscape to finally kill her, and even so she manages to escape Christmasland before finally succumbing to her wounds.
• Depraved Bisexual: Bing, who, in addition to the number of women he drugged and raped, also drugged and raped the unfortunate man who owned the Wraith after Manx and who was forcibly brought along on a ride to Manx's inscape.
• Disney Villain Death: Manx is caught in the collapsing Shorter Way, falls into a timewarp and comes out a thousand feet above a river, both killing him and destroying the Wraith so he can't come back.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Defied. Maggie claims to be perfectly fine with people pitying her, as long as she gets something out of it.

• Dysfunctional Family: Calling Vic's family dysfunctional is putting it mildly. Between an alcoholic father that keeps beating and cheating on his wife, and a resentful mother that's barely any better, slightly weird loner Vic is far and away the most stable and well-adjusted of them all. Both parents really love their daughter (and probably each other, somewhere deep down), but they often have weird ways of expressing it.
• Ear Ache:
  • Part of Charlie's ear is shot off by Bing.
  • During the climactic confrontation, Wayne gets part of an ear bitten off by one of the kids in Christmasland.
• The End... Or Is It?: The "A Note on the Type" section reveals that some of Manx's children haven't been 'fixed' and are still at large.
• Embarrassing First Name: There's nothing particularly wrong with the name "Bruce." Unless your middle name is "Wayne" because your father is a giant freaking dork.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Manx and his daughters. In the climactic face-off, Vic guns her Triumph straight at Manx's car while he and one of his girls are standing in front of it, and Manx instinctively makes the Papa Wolf gesture of getting between his daughter and the threat. In this moment Vic realizes that Manx is a Well-Intentioned Extremist at his core — like a great many monsters, he has a twisted but still caring heart and he genuinely believes his looney bullshit is morally good.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Manx is offended at the accusation that he molested or physically harmed the children that he takes to Christmasland. His attempt to kill Wayne near the end of the book suggests that he has finally grown desperate enough to violate his own moral code.
• Evil Counterpart: Bing to Lou. They are both fat, not too bright, and somewhat child-like in their thinking. However, Lou is good-hearted and responsible (if not always sensible), while Bing is Manx's willing accomplice.
• Evil Old Folks: Manx is over a hundred years old, and at least some of the time he looks it.
• Expanded Universe: Joe Hill co-wrote a comic tie-in series called Wraith.
• Expy: Bing, "The Gasmask Man," is this to the Trashcan Man from The Stand. At one point he even says "My life for you!" after Manx abandons him for screwing up an attempt to kill Vic.
• Faux Affably Evil: Manx can be quite charming, but when he's crossed he turns cruel and vicious.

• Kick the Dog: Manx kills Wayne's dog with his bone mallet after hitting it with the Wraith.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Bing is a gas mask dragon. He has had something of an obsession with gas masks, ever since he was a child and his father gave him his old Korean War gas mask and helmet for Christmas.
• Geek Physiques: Lou is the obese variety. Until the epilogue when he gets gastric bypass.
• Growing Up Sucks:

• Vic and Maggie, who were cool outsiders with magic powers as children and teens, but who as adults turned into a drunken basket case and a drug-addicted homeless prostitute, respectively. Vic at one point muses sorrowfully that she really liked the girl she was at eight and also that she is very unlike that girl now.

• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Bing is killed via his own tank of sevoflurane exploding when Vic ignites the gas he's released around her.
  • Manx is crushed in his own car and dies (again) with a mouth full of motor oil.
• Immortality Immorality: Manx can extend his life by feeding the Wraith someone's humanity and capacity for empathy. He first gave up his own to it, then went on to sacrifice that of other people.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: Tabitha is such a neat freak that she gets "a private, almost guilty, pleasure from defragmenting her hard drive."
• Informed Flaw: We're repeatedly told that Vic is a terrible mother with serious mental problems, but we rarely see her be anything but a quite good mother who's just perpetually depressed. It's implied that all her real screwups happened in the years between chapters, but we never get to see them or even hear more than passing references to them. The one instance where Vic did act crazy was in burning her house down - which is, admittedly, a pretty big screwup, but it seems less like the result of an inherent flaw and more an effect of being driven to drunkenness and despair by years of Manx's children harrassing her.

• Lack of Empathy: Manx and the children of Christmasland. Maggie thinks that NOS4A2 stole Manx's ability to feel empathy as his price for using it.
• Like Parent, Like Child: In the end, Vic admits that she's much like her father - not all bad, but never as good a parent or a person as she should have been. On the other hand, they also both show that when the chips are down, they will come through for their child, to the point of laying down their lives.
• Looks Like Orlok: Manx has some resemblances to Max Shreck (large bald head, narrow face, and fang-like teeth, made even more prominent by his overbite).
• Loony Librarian: Maggie has a weird fashion sense and psychic powers, and also a stammer which she developed as a result of using these powers (and which gets worse the more she does use them).
• Lost in Translation: When Vic's neighbor Mr. De Zoet suffers what he thinks is a stroke (it's actually due to Bing pumping sevoflurane into the house), he lapses into his native language, Dutch, and yells "Ik heb een slag". "Slag" is a possible translation for "stroke", but only when the word describes the act of hitting or striking someone/something. The medical condition, which is what's actually meant here, is called "beroerte" in Dutch.
• Loyal Phlebotinum: All of the paranormal events in the book work this way.
  • Vic McQueen has a bike that lets her instantly travel great distances and find things that have been lost.
  • Maggie Leigh has a bag of Scrabble tiles that can spell out important secrets to her.
  • Charlie Manx has a Rolls Royce Wraith that can travel to Christmasland. It also keeps him young... and consumes his (and later others') soul. He can also control it with his mind.
• Mama Bear: Don't mess with Wayne. Vic will find you, and you will be sorry.
• The Man in the Moon: The moon in Christmasland has Charlie Manx's face, and actually screams at one point during the Inscape's destruction.
• Man on Fire: Manx kills Tom Priest, a soldier that tries to arrest him at a gas station, by dousing Tom with gasoline and igniting him with a lighter.
• Manipulative Bastard: Manx is disturbingly good at pushing other people's buttons to steer them in the direction he wants them to go.
• Market-Based Title: A small example; the UK version of the book is retitled NOS4R2 to better fit the British pronunciation of "Nosferatu".
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Maggie Leigh and Vic's father.
• Meaningful Name: Possibly the Shorter Way Bridge, which surely isn't named that way in-universe because it shortens the ways for Vic.
• Middle Name Basis: Wayne's full name is Bruce Wayne Carmody.
• Misplaced Wildlife: While driving to Christmasland, Manx runs over a hedgehog not far from the Iowa border. Hedgehogs are not indigenous to North America.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: One transformation that happens to the children of Christmasland is growing multiple rows of sharp teeth. One child's teeth go all the way back to her throat. Wayne slowly but surely transforms in this way under the Wraith's influence.
• Most Writers Are Writers: Vic goes from living in near-poverty with her boyfriend and son to making a successful career for herself once she comes up with the idea for a series of children's books.
• Mr. Vice Guy: All of the protagonists have serious, human flaws — which they all acknowledge. A central theme of the book is that demanding perfection from reality is immature and ultimately as unhealthy as any other vice.
• Omniscient Morality License: Manx claims to have it. Sure, the parents he "rescued" children from might not have been abusive yet, but he supposedly foresaw a future when they would become so.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Although his license plate is NOS4A2, Manx is not a traditional vampire (he implies that he got the plate to spite his first wife for calling him a vampire). Instead of drinking blood, he maintains his youth by his car draining the souls of children as he kidnaps them to a semi-imaginary realm. In the process, though, the children become something much more resembling traditional vampires.
• Parents as People: At the beginning of the book, Vic idolizes her father and considers her mother a repressive shrew. She later learns that, while her mother might have been hard to live with, her father was sleeping around and occasionally hit her mother when he was drunk. After he abandons his wife and daughter, Vic spends years hating him, but they do manage to reconcile before they both die saving Wayne.
• Pocket Dimension: NOS4A2's back seat is one, trapping anyone in it inside so they can't escape.
• Police Are Useless: Quite. And justified, considering Manx is not one who can easily be dealt with.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Both Manx and Bing are misogynists, though in Manx's case it doesn't apply to young girls.
• Power at a Price: Using the Inscape ultimately drains its user over an extended period of time and comes with some sort of detrimental effect, either physical or mental. Maggie's stammer comes from using her tiles, and gets worse the more she does. Maggie believes that using the Wraith has caused Manx to become more and more of a sociopath. Vic has sunstroke-like symptoms after using the Shorter Way too much, and has migraine-like pain in her left eye. Later on, some of the bats inside the bridge escape, causing minor brain damage; more escape or are killed when Manx tries to run her and Wayne over inside the Shorter Way.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Bing likes to make sing-song rhymes (which irritates Manx to no end) and is clearly mentally deficient, and has murderous and rapacious tendencies that only get worse under Manx's influence.
• Rage Against the Heavens: When Bing goes back to his old church (now a condemned ruin) to pray for Manx's safe return, God seemingly rebuffs this blasphemous prayer by sending him a Humiliation Conga — first a bird shits on his face, then he trips and lands on a used condom that gets stuck on his hand, then in his hair when he tries to shake it off. His response is to throw a tantrum in the middle of the church, then leave and come back with bottles of lighter fluid to burn the place down; he ignites the blaze by setting the crucifix on fire.
  "What?" he screamed to the church. "What? I came here on my knees! I CAME ON MY KNEES! And you do what? WHAT?!"
• The Renfield: Bing does Manx's wetwork, i.e. disposing of the parents of the children Manx "saves." This often involves raping them after drugging them with sevoflurane. Maggie even explicitly calls him a Renfield when she first warns Vic about Manx.
• Rescue Equipment Attack: During the fight with Manx at a gas station, Sam Cleary knocks Manx out cold with a fire extinguisher.
• Rescue Romance: Lou helped Vic escape from Manx, and they ended up getting together after.
• Questionable Consent: Bing uses his "gingerbread smoke" (sevoflurane) on the mothers of the kidnapped children for this.
• Self-Harm: Near the end of the book Maggie's arms are covered in scars from cigarette burns. It turns out they are self-inflicted, as the intense bursts of pain help her control her worsening stammer and let her use her Scrabble tiles (which has been getting harder to do).
• Self-Made Orphan: Bing murdered both his parents.
• Shout-Out:
  • A demonic, semi-autonomous, murderous car? Sounds familiar.
  • The map of the United Inscapes of America includes the Pennywise Circus, Treehouse of the Mind, and the Lovecraft Keyhole.
    • Not to mention that Christmasland is apparently located in the Inscape equivalent of Western Colorado, like another infamous attraction.
  • After Wayne is taken, a cop mentions sending a Buddhist monk away to Shawshank.
  • A slightly ironic one. Bing complains about Wayne's name (his father is a comic fan, and named his son Bruce Wayne Carmody), saying that people shouldn't use silly comic book names, but normal names like John and Sue. If you use "Johnny" instead of "John", you get two very famous comic book characters — a brother and sister who star in the same title, no less.
  • Vic outright refers to the Christmas ornaments that Manx uses to trap the souls of children as "Horcruxes".
  • Tabitha Hutter may be a reference to the character Hutter (the Jonathan Harker stand-in) from the 1922 film Nosferatu. Tabitha is also the name of the author's mother.
  • Bing Partridge lives on a street named Bloch Lane. (Perhaps coincidentally, there's a street in Silent Hill named after the same author.)
  • Charlie Manx mentions the True Knot, and how they are in similar lines of work. The True and Manx have apparently mutually agreed to stay out of each other's way. In turn, Manx was mentioned by name by Dick Halloran's paternal grandfather, a sadistic pedophile who likely practiced black magic.
  • Mister de Zoet is mentioned as listening to the Cloud Atlas Sextet, even mentioning Robert Frobisher by name.
  • Probably one: The unfortunate Demeter family. (Of course you must know which ship brought Dracula to England...)
  • Bing pledges "my life for you" to show his loyalty to Manx. The same words spoken by the Trashcan Man to Randall Flagg in The Stand.
• Soul Jar: Manx's Christmas ornaments contain the children's humanity.
• Speech Impediment: Maggie has a stammer, a side effect of using her tiles which gets worse the more she does it.
• Spirit Advisor: The ghost of Wayne's grandmother appears to him, explaining how to postpone the loss of his soul.
• The Stinger: The "A Note on the Type" section includes a bonus scene.
• Stuff Blowing Up: The ending, with Vic blowing up Christmasland piece by piece.
• Tomboyish Name: Vic is short for Victoria, not Victor.
• The Unblinking: At one point, Wayne realizes he's never seen Manx blink.
• Uncanny Valley: Manx manages to display this verbally. His speech patterns are unfailingly formal, he largely avoids contractions, and he uses folksy expressions that sound more appropriate to a country store catalog than an actual human being. It might not seem unsettling at first, but he never speaks differently, even when he gets an ear shot off. Wayne even realizes at one point he's never seen Manx blink.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Lou and Vic. Lou starts out fat and is morbidly obese to the point of cardiac problems, while Vic keeps her beauty (for the most part).
• Viewers Are Geniuses: The "Spirit of Ecstasy" on Manx's Rolls Royce is referred to as "the bloofer lady" by Nathan Demeter. It's a reference to the original novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, but the connection is never explicitly stated; Nathan is only said to be thinking of "something he once read".
• Villainous Breakdown: Bing has one when Manx abandons him, and Manx in turn has one when Vic destroys Christmasland.
• Villainous Crush: Manx develops a weird... thing for Vic. It doesn't make him stop hating her or anything, but then he pretty much hates all women anyway.
• Villainous Incest: It's implied that Bing raped his mother before murdering her. He later has a thing for mothers in general, with a specific predilection for "mommy titties".
• Villainous Parental Instinct: Charlie Manx is (more or less) an almost 120 year old vampire who has spent most of that time abducting children and taking them to his Small, Secluded World where they, like him, become vampires completely lacking in anything like empathy and morality. He still instinctively jumps in the way of danger to protect his daughter from harm when Vic is executing her Roaring Rampage of Revenge to get her son back from Manx. Vic notices it happening but it earns no sympathy from her, she just thinks to herself that all sorts of monsters can have people they care about or can believe that their horribleness is somehow good.
• Villainy-Free Villain: The detective Daltry has nothing to do with Manx or Bing and doesn't do anything evil. He thinks Vic either killed her son or is in business with whoever did, but all the law enforcement characters suspect her for most of the story. Nonetheless, he's one of the most unpleasant characters in the book, so much so that Hutter is briefly tempted to spray mosquito repellent directly into his eyes at one point.
• Waking Up at the Morgue: Manx dies in prison after the Wraith, which is heavily damaged, has its engine removed. He later wakes up after his autopsy when the unwitting Nathan Demeter, who was restoring the Wraith as a pet project, replaced the engine.
• Walking Tech Bane: Manx, or rather his Wraith, can make lights, TV and radio go on the fritz just by coming vaguely near them; it's regularly used to announce their imminent arrival. This is eventually revealed to be a common occurrence around Strong Creatives (like Manx, Vic, and Maggie) who are using their powers.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Manx genuinely believes that he is saving his 'children' from being abused or neglected by adults by keeping them as kids forever.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Subverted with Bing. He seems like this at first, being mentally disabled, coming from a background of parental abuse, and being the victim of Manx's lies and manipulation. As the story goes on, though, he gets way too into doing Manx's dirty work and starts coming across as every bit as much of an irredeemable monster as Manx himself.

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Tropes specific to the series:

• Adaptational Backstory Change: Most of Manx’s backstory in the show is different from the novel and tie-in comic. The entire basis for Christmasland is different; rather than being a fake amusement park that Manx is swindled into buying into it is now an imaginary story that Manx relays to his daughter.
• Adaptational Heroism: Manx’s mother and wife are considerably more sympathetic than in the source material. In Wraith, both are depicted as being cruel and even abusive at times; Charlie's mother, for example, would make him sleep in a coffin.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Vic and Bing start out as friends in the series.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Manx is described as having weasel-like features and an overbite. For the television adaptation he's being played by Zachary Quinto. The impressive combination of makeup work and physical acting when Manx is in his degenerated state, however, play up this aesthetic to a Looks Like Orlok degree, creating an interesting contrast to his Classical Movie Vampire looks when he's freshly fed.
• Adaptation Expansion: The end of the second season goes past the ending of the book and sets up storylines for a potential third season.
• Adaptational Late Appearance: Lou Carmody shows up in the final episode of the first season.
• Adapted Out: In the book Manx has two daughters, Millie and Lorrie. In the show Millie is an only child.
• Affectionate Nickname: Vic calls Wayne "Bats".
• Air-Vent Passageway: Vic escapes Manx's house this way when he sets it on fire as she's locked inside.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Maggie is an important character in the book but only appears in a few chapters. In the show she's the one of the lead characters.
  • Millie Manx is a minor character in the novel. In the show she is a main character for the second season.
• The Atoner: Bing realizes Manx and he are monsters, trying to kill them both so no other children will be harmed. It doesn't work however.
• Back from the Dead: Manx gets resurrected (even after he's partly dissected, with a scalpel in his heart) once his car gets started up again by Bing.
• Bad Guy Bar: Parnassus, which exists in an inscape called "The Night Road" that can only be accessed by Strong Creatives with darkness in them. Manx is a regular patron, and is on friendly terms with several of the others.
• Bittersweet Ending: Much like the novel. Vic and Maggie destroy Christmasland, Manx is dead, Lou officially adopts Wayne and all of the children he kidnapped are free and human again. Unfortunately, Vic and Wayne now have long-lasting trauma, Maggie and Tabitha break up, and Millie Manx is still alive, with plans to rebuild Christmasland.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Manx has a very broad definition of what constitutes bad parenting. For instance, when he meets a father who exhorts his little son to be nice to old people and to reduce his sugar consumption for the sake of his health, Manx calls this father "cruel" for denying the boy the sugar cane he tried to give him. This very boy is later seen in his Wraith, already corrupted beyond help. He also thinks that women should be chaste, so a mother merely being with her boyfriend makes her by definition unfit as a parent in his eyes.
• Break Them by Talking: Manx does this when held at gunpoint by Lou, the biker who helps Vic. Given his abilities he knows not only Luke's name, but also his weak spots, and distracts him enough with this to get away.
• But Not Too Bi: Vic is bisexual, though she prefers men and she's only seen with guys.
• Compelling Voice: Hourglass can make people do what he wishes when the sand is falling. Using this, he orders the FBI agents to kill everyone they're guarding except Wayne for Manx and Bing. They attempt to, but fail.
• Continuity Nod: Manx mentions Dewey Hansom as being one of his former helpers. Dewey appeared in the comic Wraith: Welcome to Christmasland.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Millie, Manx's daughter, is almost exactly like him and turned evil at the same time (she's the first of his vampirish kids).
• Defiled Forever: Manx gets pissed when Craig claims to have "consummated his and Vic's love" because now she's no longer pure in his eyes and therefore unfit for his plans for her. For some reason he thinks that a non-virginal woman is incapable of properly caring for children.
• Disappeared Dad: Craig is killed before he even knows he's gotten Vic pregnant, leaving her to raise their baby. However, Carmody becomes his dad after this.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Wayne is never called by his first name Bruce until Manx, and insists no one does (perhaps because together this makes up Batman's name).
• The Dog Bites Back: Bing attacks Manx after being left behind and realizing he had no intentions of bringing him to Christmasland.
• The Dreaded: Manx seems to be this to other famous villains (see Lawyer-Friendly Cameo) at the Parnassus bar; when they see him they immediately get up to leave.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Manx turns out to have a daughter named Millie whom he clearly loves in his own twisted way, while she loves him in return (Millie's also evil, so this counts for her as well).
• Fate Worse than Death: In the second season, Charlie Manx and Bing attempt to kidnap Vic's son Wayne. She knows very well that if successful he'll face a Fate Worse than Death, turning into one of Manx's vampiric children.
• From Bad to Worse: Episode 8 of the series really isn't kind to Vic. First she discovers that her mom sold her dirtbike, then Maggie ducks out of helping her get it back (for good reasons, though), then her mother finds out she's been taking drugs, forbids her from going to college and basically throws her out of her house, and to top it all off, Bing waylays her in the woods as she's running away.
• Healing Factor: Manx is capable of healing any injury, even coming Back from the Dead, so long as his car is running and intact.
• Heel Realization: Bing belatedly realizes he's a bad guy for helping Manx, trying to kill them both afterward.
• Hope Spot: Bing turns on Manx, trying to kill both of them. However, Wayne stops him, not realizing what he's doing in his vampiric state.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty:
  • Bing kidnaps Vic with the intent of killing her to get back on Charlie's bad side. Before doing so, it's implied he wants to rape her first but she escapes.
  • He later tries this on Manx of all people.
• Intimate Marks: Maggie has had a large rose tattooed onto her left breast in the second season.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The Parnassus bar has patrons who resemble Pennywise, Freddy Krueger and Sadako/Samara.
• Lecherous Licking: Occurs between Bing and Vic when he has her captive.
• Lipstick Lesbian: Maggie is revealed to be a lesbian (by abruptly having sex with a woman she's just met). She's got a faminine style, with long hair, wearing stylish blouses and skirts while using makeup. The woman she hooks up with in the scene is also quite feminine, and has a style that's similar.
• Love Makes You Stupid: After Vic got kidnapped by Bing, Craig grabs a baseball bat and goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Bing despite his promise to Vic to not do this. Predictably, things don't turn out so well for him.
• Matricide:
  • Charlie's revealed to have killed his mother.
  • Millie killed her own mother after turning evil.
• Modesty Bedsheet: After having sex with Carmody, Vic's got the covers around her chest.
• Murder-Suicide: Bing tries to kill himself and Manx by destroying the Wraith in a crusher. Wayne stops him however.
• My Grandson, Myself: When Manx gets recognized as similar to his younger self at a road stop he's frequented, he says that's his grandson.
• Nail 'Em: Bing kills both his parents and one of the mothers of Manx's 'children' with a nail gun.
• Next Thing They Knew: A young woman comes into the library to ask Maggie about a book. With no interval, we then see her giving Maggie oral sex in the stacks.
• No-Sell: Tabitha shoots Manx in the head at close range. He shrugs this off within seconds.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Millie is only occasionally called by her full name, Millicent.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Bing's idea of a disguise consists of donning the distinctive jumpsuit he wears at work, masking the name and company tags with some duct tape, and putting on a gas mask that is hilariously ineffective at hiding his identity. Justified of course by his diminished intelligence, and it still does the job because he never seems to encounter any witnesses during his criminal acts.
• Parental Substitute: Carmody becomes Wayne's surrogate dad in the second season, and gets addressed as such.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: After failing in the task Hourglass sent him on, the male FBI agent shoots himself under his influence.
• Race Lift: Tabitha, Lou and Maggie are black in the show.
• Rape Discretion Shot: Bing in the television show rapes his mother off-screen.
• Related Differently in the Adaptation: Lou is Wayne's stepfather rather than his biological father.
• Sex Starts, Story Stops: Early in the series, Maggie is sorting books in her library when a woman her age walks in to ask for a book. One cut later, and that woman is eating Maggie out in a scene that serves no purpose other than to establish Maggie's sexual orientation, which a later episode does again, only much better. It's then subverted when the two are interrupted before Maggie can finish.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Both times Vic is with her boyfriends, the scene fades out. Maggie, on the other hand, gets a far more explicit scene with a woman.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Vic is clearly traumatized from her experiences in the second season. It's mentioned that Vic hallucinates ringing phones and other electronics going haywire, while Carmody says every Christmas she'll drink until she passes out. He finally insists that she get professional help after one freak out causes a fire to start accidentally, endangering Wayne. It doesn't happen though — she's off after Manx soon after.
• Shout-Out Theme Naming: Vic names her son "Bruce Wayne".
• Sinister Car: Manx's Rolls Royce that travels between worlds and feeds on human souls.
• Slut-Shaming: Manx is extreme about this, viewing all mothers who have sex outside marriage to be unfit, no matter how good they actually are with their kids. He kidnaps their kids as a result, taking them away into his domain.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Just after losing her boyfriend in the effort to stop Manx, Vic learns that she's pregnant by him.
• Soul Jar: The ornaments near the entry to Christmasland turn out to hold the souls of the children Manx has taken. Only by smashing them will they be freed.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Maggie, Bing, Vic and Millie all die in the book. In the show they have all survived past the events of the novel.
• Super-Strength: Not to comic book hero levels, but Manx in his younger form is much stronger than a man of his build should be. At one point he throws Vic's dirtbike several meters without visible effort.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Vic and Maggie display this contrast. The former is a bit of an unkempt beauty who has fairly masculine clothing, works as a mechanic and rides motorcycles, while Maggie has more feminine looks, working in a library (at first anyway).
• Token Minority Couple: In the second season, Maggie's girlfriend is also black.
• Twofer Token Minority: Maggie, who is a lesbian, becomes black here.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: When Vic sticks her fingers down Maggie's throat to force her to puke up some drugs she took, the camera cuts away right as all the shit comes up... only to stay on it in the very next cut when Vic immediately does it again.
• Would Not Hurt A Child: Manx insists that Bing never manhandle a child, and gives him a single warning after he grabs Haley (only temporarily, as she quickly breaks free by kicking him in the shin). Knocking them out with gas though doesn't "count" in his eyes, as he feels he's rescuing children from abuse (often just mild neglect at worst).
• You Have to Believe Me!: Vic struggles to convince people that Bing killed Sharon Smith, but with no evidence it naturally doesn't sway police. After she tells the detective who is lead on the case just how she knows about this (and Charlie Manx) she's referred for psychiatric help.

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