NOS4A2

“Josiah should come for a ride in the Wraith. He’d be happy forever in Christmasland. The world can’t ruin him there, because it isn’t in the world. It’s in my head. They’re all safe in my head.”

Manx talks to the Nurse about her son. This early conversation foreshadows much of what Vic will learn about Christmasland and Manx’s symbiotic relationship with his car. Manx believes his actions spare children the suffering of the real world, even though he benefits from trapping them in a place that exists only in his mind. He possesses them entirely at Christmasland, but their humanity is the price.

“She had gone looking for her mother’s bracelet in her imagination, and somehow she had found it. She had never gone out on her bike at all. Probably her parents had never really fought. There was only one way to explain a bridge crammed into an alley.”

Even as a child, Vic tells herself that she is either dreaming or her perception is breaking from “reality.” She will talk herself out of the reality of her Lost and Found trips. As an adult, before the phone calls begin, she no longer believes that it ever happened. She believes that the staff at the psychiatric hospital helped her see her delusions for what they were, rather than believing her own experience.

“He had no idea where or what Christmasland was, had never heard of it. And yet he instantly felt he had wanted to go there all his life…to walk its cobblestone streets, stroll beneath its leaning candy-cane lampposts, and to watch the children screaming as they were swept around and around on the reindeer carousel.”

Bing reacts to seeing the advertisement for Christmasland in the issue of Spicy Menace. His internal monologue—as well as his boyish exuberance—immediately cast him as a “disturbed,” “emotionally stunted” man with many childlike qualities. Manx will exploit Bing, as well as the pleasure Bing takes in cruelty. Bing becomes another of Manx’s children, although he will never see Christmasland, because he is an adult.