History Literature / Nos4a2

* AdaptationRelationshipOverhaul:
** Vic and Bing start out as friends in the series.
** Lou is Wayne's stepfather rather than his biological father.

* ADateWithRosiePalms: How Bing is introduced, pleasuring himself with the help of a 1940s-era men's magazine from his father's collection.

* DoorStopper
* TheDragon: Bing.

* FlamethrowerBackfire: How Vic [[spoiler: takes out Bing.]]
* FriendToAllChildren: Manx considers himself this.

** Manx and Bing believe that they are 'rescuing' children from this.
** Also the case for 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.

* JourneyToTheCenterOfTheMind: Effectively Christmasland is this for Charlie Manx.

* LoonyLibrarian: Maggie. She 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).

* PsychopathicManchild: Bing. He 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.

* TheRenfield: Bing; he 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.

* SoulJar: [[spoiler: Manx's Christmas ornaments contain the children's humanity.]]

* CoitusEnsues: 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.

-->'''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. [[[[http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/04/interview-nos4a2-author-joe-hill Innocence is ignorance.]]

-->'''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. [[http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/04/interview-nos4a2-author-joe-hill]]

* BigBeautifulMan: Vic is physically attracted to Lou in spite of his obesity; she likes the way he smells and the way his body feels against hers.

* BiggerOnTheInside: 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.

** Maggie Leigh has a bag of Scrabble tiles that can spell out important secrets to her.

* SelfHarm: 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).

* ManOnFire: Manx kills Tom Pries, a soldier that tries to arrest him at a gas station, by dousing Tom with gasoline and igniting him with a lighter.