Stephen King - Joyland

Published: 2013

I love Stephen King books. There, I said it. Yes, the literary establishment may be a tad sniffy about mass-market ‘pulp’ genres like horror, but so what? With one or two exceptions, you don’t sell millions of books without being at least vaguely proficient.

                I’ve been reading King for years. At an age when many teenage boys give up reading fiction altogether, it was staying up late and terrifying myself stupid with The Shining and Pet Sematary that kept me going. Later, at university, members of the writers’ group I joined also had King novels sitting alongside more ‘worthy’ tomes on their bookshelves. It’s no different these days; I have a friend who proudly proclaims that she ‘owns everything Stephen King has ever written.’

                Stephen King novels fit into three broad categories: the good early ones (Carrie, It, The Shining etc), the dodgy, cocaine-fuelled ones (The Tommyknockers, Needful Things) and, er, the new ones. His recent record has been patchy yet sporadically brilliant. Attempts at straight horror compare poorly with the classics: Duma Key was boring and Cell idiotic. Yet 11.22.63 (a time travel adventure centred on the Kennedy assassination) demonstrated how he had matured as an author. So basically, his latest novel, Joyland, has a tossed coin’s chances of being a good ‘un.

                Joyland winds back the clock to 1973, which feels like King’s comfort zone; he always seems most comfortable writing about the old, industrial, blue collar America of his youth. Like the teenage King, the first-person narrator, Devin Jones, is an aspiring author and current student, taking various menial jobs to get himself through college. When an opportunity presents itself to spend the summer working at Joyland, a seaside amusement park, it appears preferable to canteen dishwashing as well as a good way to get over his obviously disintegrating relationship with his girlfriend. Devin arrives as a total outsider (‘greenie’) and must quickly integrate himself into the ways, lore and language of the ‘carnies’.

                Joyland is the kind of park which existed in the States before Disney et al managed to completely monopolise the amusement park business – a glorified travelling fairground with all the associated myth and folklore, complete with resident fortune teller. But King doesn’t play the ‘creepy, old fashioned fairground’ card to the extent you’d expect (or in the way he probably would have done earlier in his career). In fact, the only ghost is – unusually – not witnessed by the main character at all, and there are no nail-biting scenes of supernatural tension of the kind that got me hooked on King’s work as a teenager. So, if you’re expecting a horror yarn, this isn’t it.

                The mystery lurking beneath Joyland’s garish facade is the unsolved murder of a female guest in the darkness of the House of Horror ride. But I would argue that this, at least if you’re a seasoned crime fiction reader, won’t satisfy deep down either. Joyland may be published by pulp crime outfit Hard Case Crime, but no real clues are given to help the reader solve the mystery before the killer is revealed. It’s not just that the ability to do so is an integral part of the crime genre; it’s also that most murder mysteries don’t rely so heavily on a psychic child character to help solve the crime.

                OK, so Joyland doesn’t really make the mark as either a horror story or a crime thriller. But I would recommend it for other reasons. Characterisation is now honed to a fine point, a point which most of King’s contemporaries rarely achieve. Dialogue, too, is handled with King’s hallmark panache. Particularly enjoyable was the believable (although apparently mostly made-up) carnie patter and lore – you can immerse yourself in the details of the place. I usually find it difficult to give a damn about the characters in most horror or crime thrillers, but it’s an area in which King is adept at hitting the high notes. In that regard, I wouldn’t rate this as highly as deeply poignant previous works like Different Seasons, or the underrated Hearts In Atlantis, but King is at least keen to show us he still knows what he’s doing.

                Also to recommend it is its length, or lack of. It has to be said that King is prone on occasion to writing some hugely over-long novels (The Stand, anyone?) but this isn’t one of them. It’s straight and to the point, which books like this need to be. It’s a nice easy weekend read.

                As Garth Marenghi, the fictional horror author in the TV parody Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace boasts, ‘I’m one of the few authors who has written more books than most people have read.’ King has by now produced enough novels to fill the capacious trunk of a Plymouth Fury, and not all of them good. But at least Joyland, whilst not up there with the best, is a minor gem.