Joyland

Joyland by Stephen King

Looking at the cover of this book and seeing this thing advertised as a “Hard Case Crime” story, you might think that King is trying something different here.  Maybe he’s taking a break from his macabre style and tackling a Mickey Spillane pulp-like story from the 1950s.  Don’t be fooled.  This is a Stephen King story through and through.  There’s nothing here that makes this story different from 90% of what the man has written — except the weird cover.

I’ve mentioned in several other reviews of King’s work, that he isn’t really that much of a horror author, although the majority of his books do seem to contain several elements of the unexplained or the unseen.  Joyland pretty much fits this description.  Oh sure, there’s a ghost or two contained in the story, but this isn’t exactly a tale that will require you to sleep with a night light.

Devin Jones is a 21 year old college kid going to school up in the Northeast.  He sees an advert to work in an amusement park in North Carolina for a summer, and it sounds like a fun thing to do.  So Devin heads south and begins a “Carny” adventure.  There are a lot of “Carny” references in this story, but the Joyland park isn’t a sleazy carnival that travels from town to town.  No, it’s more of a respectable amusement park anchored in a small town that’s probably in a league just below a Six Flags, and barely manages to squeeze a profit each year.

And the job is fun.  Or at least Devin seems to really like it.  Part of the fascination is that he’s also trying to escape the pain of a broken heart.  You see, his girlfriend back home is slowly dumping him during these few months.  He kind of knows it all along, but he hangs on to hope until one day when he gets the fateful “Dear John” letter.  So work away at the park he does to try to forget his lost love.  There are other college kids here working over the summer as well, and many of them share a boarding house up the beach from the park.  It’s actually a pretty good gig for a young kid during the summer, and Devin manages to make a couple of lifelong pals.

The real thrill at Joyland, is that, see, there was a murder in the “fun house” ride many years ago.  They never caught the killer, and it’s said that the ghost of the murdered girl still haunts the ride.  In these kids’ spare time, they do a lot of detective work, going through old newspapers etc. trying to piece together clues that will help them answer a lot of questions.

There are a lot of other supernatural forces at work here as well.  A bit too much, really.  Maybe I’m just saying that because I think the story could have done quite well without a lot of the woo-hoo.  I don’t mind woo-hoo, it just didn’t seem that necessary here, at least not to the extreme lengths that the tale is presented.

I should also mention that the story is told in first person, but happened around 40 years ago.  Devin, now in his sixties, is an author of stories for several random magazine periodicals, so he’s telling us a tale of his youth that, obviously, has stayed with him very solidly.  For better or worse.

I enjoyed the book, although it wasn’t one of King’s truly memorable tales.  My guess is that, one year from now, I will have probably forgotten most of the details.  I thought the ending tied up all of the pieces a bit too neatly and too quickly.  This is a rare instance where I felt that Stephen King should have made a story longer as opposed to trimming it several hundred pages.  Had he did that, though, he may not have been able to release it in this “Hard Case” paperback format, which seems to be one of his main intentions for some silly reason.