Joyland (Hard Case Crime)

Although I am a big Stephen King fan, I had never paid much attention to Joyland. Maybe it was the cover which seemed unnecessarily garish. I had never even read the book’s blurb or any of reviews. Whatever the reason I resisted reading this novel, I succumbed to my love of King’s writing and added it to my Kindle. It’s a good thing I gave in to that impulse because Joyland is one of the best crime ghost stories I’ve read in a while. I was captivated by the story, the characters, and, of course, King’s sharp writing. This is one of those stories that leads you gently in; introducing the main character, flawed and vulnerable, and making you wonder what could possibly be so interesting it takes a book to tell the tale. Devin Jones is a likable and relatable character. Nursing a broken heart, the college student gets a job as a “carny” at an amusement park called Joyland. It’s summer in a small North Carolina town and Devin signs on at the amusement park in Heaven’s Bay. King sprinkles the story liberally with the language of carnies, “the talk.” Every character steps forward with a unique identity as mysteries unfold. And the mysteries are both scary and heartwarming. King has an uncanny ability to blend the tender with the violent, the sweet with the bitter, and the every day with the nightmare. Devin Jones may be the narrator of the story, but there is a hell of a lot more to this than the adventures of a “twenty-one-year-old virgin” and a summer job at a small, local amusement park. Joyland may be the place families gather for fun, but there is far more to the place than Howie the Happy Hound, Happy Helpers, a fortune teller named Madame Fortuna (Rozzie Gold), Hollywood Girls with cameras, and the Wiggle Waggle Village. There’s Horror House. Every amusement park and carnival has one, a scary ride. This scary ride is extra special. Horror House was the scene of a murder; an unsolved murder. And that unsolved murder left a little something behind; the ghost of Linda Gray. Here lies the first mystery. Stephen King can’t leave that mystery to stand alone, although it is a good one. There’s also the little boy in the wheelchair, the woman, and the Jack Russell Terrier that live in the big house on the beach. King artfully weaves these stories together, delicately connecting the dots. But even when I thought I knew the answer (and that happened more than once), I was taken by surprise. When the climax finally came in a hair-raising ride in the middle of a storm I was sitting up in bed practically hearing the thunder and watching the lightning flash. Alongside the King horror is the poignant story of a young man inexplicably cast in the role of hero and detective, a mother and a boy with a special gift, and the pain of love and loss. As I said, King has an uncanny ability. Whether you are a Stephen King fan or not, if you enjoy a solid mystery with vibrant characters, read Joyland.

JOYLAND

Stephen King does it again for me -- and many, many others -- with his latest and one of his greatest, JOYLAND. Part love story, part coming of age story, part ghost story, part mystery, and ALL Stephen King, this book has something for everyone. I could not turn the pages quickly enough.

Narrated by an aged Devin Jones, he recollects his 21st year of life, having his heart broken by being rejected by a girl he thought he loved, going to college, deciding to work the summer at a carnival located on the beach near the ocean, namely one JOYLAND.

Devin meets and makes new friends, learns how to do virtually every job a carnival has to offer, and learns there was a murder there years ago in the Horror House. Some say that the murdered girl still haunts the ride and many have claimed to even have seen her over the years.

King writes his mystery novel as fluidly and smoothly as he does his horror. If you are looking for the writing we all loved in THE SHINING, THE STAND, or SALEM'S LOT, you won't find that in this book. You WILL find the magnificent writing style of Mr. King, but this time his genre is mystery, love, the human touch of a young college kid, a good guy, trying to do the best he can.

King also admits to doing his carnival homework, working in true carnival slang and jargon, making the book read all the more realistically. Go back to the early 1970's to an era where the world is changing and life still offers up a boatload of mystery and unanswered questions.

And this is some of the best that Stephen King has to offer -- I loved this book, read it in a mere few hours of time. The suspense is thick, the story line thrilling, the characters fleshed-out and real. You will fall in love -- like I did -- with Annie and Mike and Milo and Mrs. Shoplaw and Fortuna -- and all of the carnies, and Erin and Tom -- King makes you care about every single person he introduces you to, pulling you into their lives and the story at hand. More than once King did one thing to me that he rarely does -- he brought me to tears on more than one occasion. This book can also be considered a tear-jerker -- and that's OK!

Should you read JOYLAND? YES!!!!! I found this book to be refreshing, mysterious, intelligent, captivating, stimulating, and downright FUN -- Mr. King -- you have done it again. So, get inside the ferriswheel car, buckle up, pull the bar down tight, and hang on for the ride of your life!

Thanks.

Pam

Joyland is an excellent story from Stephen King. He takes us back to the days when small private carnivals and amusement parks still operated, some traveling from town to town, appearing overnight after the trucks roll in and the tents are pitched, while some were fixed in place in the beach towns and vacation spots of our country. He gives us characters with heart and doesn't burden the story with gratuitous or contrived suspense.

The main character, Devon, is a college student who takes a summer job at a small amusement park located in a beach town in North Carolina. He quickly fits in and earns the respect of the long-term carny hands as well as his fellow summer workers. He is an easy-going and reflective young man, going through the pain of first separation and then rejection from his college girlfriend. When the summer ends he decides to stay on full time at the carnival rather than return to school.

Devon becomes friends with a woman and her son. They live in a large house on the beach, and the boy is wheelchair bound and stricken with Muscular Dystrophy. He also has a wisdom beyond his years, and he is able to see things that others cannot . Devon encounters them initially in his walks along the beach, and when he helps the boy to launch a kite into the wind, the ice is broken. The boy's young mother is protective of her son as well as suffering herself, partly from the stress of caring for her disabled boy and partly due to estrangement from her family. Gradually Devon becomes close to them, each helping the other to deal with the pains in their lives. Finally, Devon hosts them for a day at the amusement park, closed for the winter but powered-up for this special occasion. It is a wonderful gift for the boy who has until then only observed it from afar.

The mystery of a long-unsolved murder at the amusement part builds very slowly as we get to know Devon and the other characters. Early in his employment at the park Devon learns of the death of a girl who had been on the ride in the house of horrors. Her ghost is said to continue to haunt the park. When one of his co-workers sees the ghost himself, Devon's desire to learn how she was killed and why it was never solved grows until he is consumed by the need to solve the crime. It eventually leads him to uncovering the long-buried truth, a great and surprising climax to the story.

I think that it is great that Stephen King's latest novel has been released as an affordable paperback novel rather than an expensive hard-cover book (or as an e-book, although I'm sure that it will be eventually). The publisher - "Hard Case Crime" - is one that I have been familiar with for a while, because for the past several years they have been releasing paperback crime novels in the style of those published in the U.S. from the 1940's through about the 1960's - check out for example

Big Steve King (as Joe Bob Briggs always called him) generally doesn't grab me, but this time he got me "right here." He really got me this time. I found myself crying at several points in the novel.

The story is bittersweet, but satisfying. I can see why he chose this line to place the novel instead of just putting it out there as if it were one of his horror blockbusters, because it isn't that. It IS more like the noir stuff in the rest of this line.

I don't care for horror and gore and the stuff that people generally go for in the big SK novels. This is not that. This is literary. It could have been written by Saul Bellow, John Irving, John Updike, or (and this is who I kept thinking of) Ray Bradbury, whose voice/tone is often in tune with the style of this book (think SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, which I also recommend highly). It has the flavor of looking back over the years at your coming-of-age, just like A SEPARATE PEACE and SUMMER OF '42. This one is like an old-fashioned BOOK book from the Olden Days in a sense, back when every sentence didn't have to drive towards the One Big Point and "Advance The Story." Some of the scenes can just be atmospheric, explore the human condition, demonstrate the multifacetedness of even the worst sort of person, make us chuckle fondly. The book is atmospheric and takes you back to one man's unforgettable coming-of-age summer and a time when carnivals were CARNY. The story is not for someone who just wants it to "hurry up and scare you" or to "get on with it, plot ONLY." It's not chaos and crazy credibility-stretching stuff. It's about a guy who is at a turning point in his life as he is dumped by his first real love (and this is something no one ever forgets--you are never hurt in the same way again because you know better the next time) and who finds a certain educational and peacefulness value in being a Worker for once.

I loved the carnival behind-the-scenes stuff, of course. I loved the ghost and the mystique/legends that had grown up around sightings of the ghost. I thought it was very realistic about the hard facts of Duchenne MD and what happens to Jerry's Kids (he doesn't use this term even once in the book, but that's what I'll always think of.) "The sight," the afterlife, the perspective of someone who is learning to deal with love and loss. For a change, I can admire and identify with this ADMIRABLE lead character with integrity, someone who cares about others even when they aren't a stepping-stone to what he wants. It left me nostalgic for my 1970s childhood (and its innocence/simplicity compared to now) and made me want to listen to the Doors again.

I don't understand the reviews that say "fun read" or "fast quick read" or whatever. Seriously, this one ripped my heart out several times. I think you'll return to this story because of its exploration of the human heart and our eternal condition of wanting to KNOW.

One nitpick that I can't believe the editor did not correct: "Capisce" is the word that the Mafia guys on TV use. It isn't spelled phonetically the way it is here. It's a real word in Italian. He expected the editor to fix that, obviously, but that slipped through. It's not "kapish" or "kapeesh" or anything else. Capisce?