Joyland by Stephen King


Joyland could be described as a crime novel or detective novel if you like but it's is just as much a coming of age story, a story of a writer looking back at his life, a trip into nostalgia, a screed against the unfairness of this world where children die of cancer while Dick Cheney keeps on going strong, and of course a ghost story. King knows just which buttons to push and he does it so well that you forget that this is fiction. You get totally immersed into his world.

The book jumps around in time but perhaps it's something that happens to us when we get older, as the narrator is.

It's 1973. Devin Jones is a college student, a virgin, who is madly in love with his classmate Wendy Keegan. However what's apparent to the reader immediately but unfortunately doesn't become apparent to Devin until much later is that Wendy has friend-zoned Devin. She doesn't mind messing around with Devin but certainly won't do THAT thing with him. Finally, from afar she dumps him.

Devin's new summer job is at Joyland, a North Carolina independent amusement park/carnival. Joyland is almost defiantly old school carnival. It is not corporate owned. It lacks modern rides and events. In fact it's a struggle each summer for Joyland to stay in the black financially. But Joyland does have loyalty from its workers. Against the odds Devin finds that not only does he like the work but that he's good at it, especially the draining and dangerous task of putting on a dog costume in hot southern summers and entertaining the kids.

But Joyland has secrets. A ride is supposedly haunted. A few Joyland employees have unusual abilities which the thoroughly skeptical Devin can't entirely ignore. But it's when Devin meets Annie and her chronically sick son Mike, that he's inspired to look further into the history of the Joyland ghost as well as a string of murders that have occurred across the southeast. Devin also makes friends with fellow college students and co-workers Erin Cook and Tom Kennedy. Sadly for Devin, the beautiful Erin only has eyes for Tom, but unlike Wendy, Erin is honest.

This is a very good book. There are no gross out scenes in it. Supernatural elements are very muted. I hate to keep going back to this as an example but once again this story reminds me of what I think of as King's masterpiece "The Last Rung On The Ladder". Joyland is not about things that go bump in the night. It's about the darkness in the human heart. Pick this one up. It's just under 300 pages.