When I was in high school, I had a big Stephen King phase (like had my sweet sixteen party at the hotel that inspired the Shining big). I read a huge portion of his catalog and really loved the suspense and scare factor. Sometime in my twenties, I stopped liking that feeling, and mostly cut horror out of my media diet. So when my book club picked this one, I was apprehensive. My only experience with Joe Hill was a short story collection I found when I lived abroad and read because English books were so hard to come by, and that collection was SCARY.
I'm not sure if this book was not that scary or if I'm just no longer as easy to scare as a I once was. Hill refers to it as his senior thesis on horror fiction, and the nods to his father's work are everywhere. It's at many points clever, and the heroes are unconventional and interesting. It also has an extremely well written child protagonist which is a rarity. The pacing and suspense are right up there with King's work too (I do feel bad to keep comparing the two as I'm sure Hill is sick of it, but this book is so clearly a love letter to his father's work).
That said, did I enjoy it? Not really. As a new mom, I'm really not into child endangerment stories, and a lot of the trauma and scary parts were less suspenseful and more uncomfortable for me. Mild bad things happen to kids and dogs in this book, and I am just not here for that I pretty much knew who would live and die because of the tried and true King formulas, and the horrific Christmas imagery was just not something I enjoyed at all. Is it a bad book? Not at all. If you enjoy horror, especially works like IT, I think this is a great piece in that genre, but the time when I could really enjoy it is long past.