NOS4A2

Charles Manx is the villain of the novel. He is an unnaturally old being who shares many similarities with classic vampires like Nosferatu, a nickname he received from his wife, and which he applies to the Wraith’s license plates. Manx wears archaic clothes and speaks in the flamboyant nature of a vaudeville promoter. He is a more complicated character than he first appears. At first glance, Manx seems to be a sadistic child murderer who enjoys sadism and cruelty under the guise of protecting the children he abducts. However, as the novel progresses Vic sees that Manx believes in the decency of his motives. He is willing to exploit the children he abducts and drain them to extend his life, but he also believes that it spares them the suffering they would encounter in the real world, had they been allowed to grow old.

Manx has a mean streak toward women, and he speaks venomously of his wife, and how she scolded him for buying the Wraith. He says that his two daughters were the first visitors to Christmasland, which he describes as a place of ultimate delight, where there is no suffering. However, Manx has lost his humanity. He has no empathy, and perhaps he never did. One of his primary characteristics is that he is no longer able to feel happiness, even if he does not acknowledge it. Instead, he settles for amusement, which is obvious in the games he plays with Vic, and Vic mirrors this amusement as a substitute for happiness in her own half-smile.

Interestingly, Manx is not given an origin story, unlike most vampires in popular novels. In popular novels like Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, the stories’ most satisfying set pieces often involve scenes in which the reader learns how the respective vampires were created, where, and by whom. In NOS4A2, the reader does not see Manx’s evolution toward monstrosity or away from his humanity, if such a thing even occurred. This makes him more fearsome in some ways, as it presents him more as an inevitable force than a corrupted human who slowly became a monster. He is the third in his line of Manxes, and the reader may glean that either he reinvents himself with each purported death or he is the recipient of generational violence as equally as he causes it.

Lou Carmody is Wayne’s father. After he saves Vic from Manx, they start a relationship that results in Wayne’s birth. He is a kind man with a natural gift for mechanics, although he wanted to start his own comic book company. His father—a Marine—shamed him for his unserious interests and Wayne has always regretted not standing up to him. For most of the novel, Lou’s primary characteristic is insecurity about his abilities, his weight, his capacity to assert himself, his ability to help Vic with her mental struggles, and an intense streak of self-loathing.

Like many of the other characters, Lou is pulled by compulsions: “What he hated, what made him squirmy and ill inside, was his own inability to change his habits. He genuinely could not say the things he needed to say, could not order the salad when he smelled French fries” (505). He knows there are better choices he could make, but they are always out of reach, even though they are small. Lou knows that his habits put his health at risk, but he seems unable to resist his appetites any more than Manx can resist his, or that Vic can suddenly morph into a peaceful person who no longer needs distraction and travel.

Lou often wishes for second chances, which makes him feel worse. He asks himself, “Was there any urge more pitiful—or more intense—than wanting another chance at something?” (427). The author here uses Lou to illustrate the weight of possibilities. Once a choice is made, one reality is chosen, but inscapes create a reality in which the possibility still exists for the other reality. Lou’s self-loathing is different than Vic’s, however. Lou’s insecurities are not based on his largest mistakes, but on his accumulating habits and his interests, which he views as childish, an attitude that is largely a function of his macho father’s disapproval. Thus, while the sins of Vic’s father result in catastrophic choices for Vic, the sins of Lou’s father result in smaller poor choices that add up to catastrophe for his health, both mental and physical.

Vic disagrees with Lou’s self-image. She tells him:

You are a real honest-to-God hero. And I don’t mean because you put me on the back of your motorcycle and drove me away from this place. That was the easy part. I mean because you’ve been there for Wayne every single day. Because you made school lunches and you got him to his dentist appointments and you read to him at night (902).

Thus, just as Lou’s small poor choices add up to his endangerment on a grander scale, his small positive choices also have a grand-scale positive effect on Wayne. In a telling moment, Lou admits to himself that his proudest moment was saving Vic from Manx, but he also robbed himself of the chance to tell Wayne about his triumph, because he promised Vic that only she could speak about Manx with their son.

Bruce Wayne Carmody—who goes by Wayne—is the son of Vic and Lou. His nickname is from the Batman comics, which takes on a greater resonance when Lou reveals that he always wanted to start a comic book company and when Vic’s travels across the Shorter Way involve bats with her face on them. Like Vic, Wayne is a melancholy kid, which is largely a product of the struggles his parents face. Vic’s difficulties are particularly hard on him. During his brief life, she has been committed to a psychiatric facility, struggled with addiction, and left most of the parenting to Lou. He has few memories of being happy or peaceful:

Bruce Wayne Carmody had been unhappy for so long that it had stopped being a state he paid attention to. Sometimes Wayne felt that the world had been sliding apart beneath his feet for years. He was still waiting for it to pull him down, to bury him at last (406).

In some ways, his mother’s struggles force Wayne to grow up too soon. However, it is not until Manx takes him that Wayne begins to literally lose his innocence. He is a kind, thoughtful boy, and he notices immediately when awful images start to entertain him.

Wayne does not understand exactly how pure his humanity is until he realizes that it is slipping away from him. When the novel ends, Wayne has been struggling with feelings that would be familiar to Vic. He worries that he will never be okay, and that he will never be able to move on from the experience. However, when the novel ends, he no longer feels Manx’s influence, and his character arc is shifting toward optimism for the future.