#BookReview #SummerChills ‘Joyland’ by Stephen King

About the book…

Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.

‘Joyland’ is a brand-new novel and has never previously been published.

The third collab between Stephen King and Titan imprint Hard Case Crime, this, to me, feels like both his most personal and reflective title  yet, reminiscent of ‘The Body’ and ‘Shawshank Redemption’. This is reflected in  the first person narrative and the lack of chapters which create a stream of consciousness as Devin, ‘Jonesy’, looks back on the summer which, essentially, made him.

Taking a break from college and trying to assuage his broken heart-is there anything quite like the first time love is unrequited or your heart is broken?-he signs up to work the summer season at Joyland, a theme park in the 1970’s. The nostalgia value is sky high, from listening to vinyls at night, the boarding house where everyone has to, out of necessity, get along, and the sheer room for the characters to breathe as they are unrestricted by the vagaries of modern -21st century-culture.

The myths built up around fairground life divide those who are carny-by-carny, dyed in the wool fairground folk, and the greenies who work a season or two. We get an induction , as do the kids, into the labour intensive nature of ‘working the fur’ , hawking the rides, how they are managed-health and safety nuts might find this truly horrifying how little training they get!-and how the girls are dressed up as camera dollies, who try and trick families and couples into buying instant pics of their magical day out.

Characters come thick and fast, there is Eddie, a mean lifetime carny who persists in riding Jonesy for the sin of daring to have an education and repeatedly calls him ‘kiddo’. There are Jonesy’s friends, Erin and Tommy who become as close as a threesome can be, Mrs Shoplaw, the maternal  boarding house matron at Heaven’s Beach, Rozzie Gold, the fairground psychic and the owner, Bradley Easterbrook.

It reminded me, in the vignettes of daily life at the fair, of the way King structured ‘Salem’s Lot, you get such a lot of book in a relatively short space-283 pages-that it demands you to read slowly, and savour the details. King takes you to the seaside, you can all but smell the popcorn, see the steam rising off the boardwalk and taste the hotdogs from the Pup-A-Licious stand.

When he is good, King is great, here he mixes a coming of age story, with a murder mystery and the nature of being haunted. Jonesy is haunted by his lost love who has abandoned him without a second glance, the fact he feels he matters to nobody, didn’t even see the Haunted House ride ghost, the wickedly named Linda Gray, literally a ‘gray lady’, and was bypassed by Erin for best friend Tommy. He moons around the boarding house, listening to The Doors, and pining for Wendy, suffering night after night of insomnia as he turns over the events of his life. And as the summer progresses, he grows in personality by finding his niche-wearing the Howie the Happy Hound costume and entertaining the children-and also in maturity.

Things happen for a reason-the predictions he is foretold by Rozzie occur because they were meant to, he was aware of his environment because she alerted him to it. He might not have seen the murdered young woman , caught eternally between the Dungeon and the Torture Chamber, but his belief in his friends and , eventually, a young boy living his last summer as Jonesy truly lives his first, is what matters. Witnesses to the events which cannot always be explained are 10 a penny but truly having someone who believes that what you saw is what you saw is a totally different matter.

So with supernatural undertones of ghostly interventions, a dark heart running through a place that makes childhood memories, and a glorious coming of age tale which is written in the way that only King can write them, ‘Joyland’ is a brilliantly moving story that hits the sweet spot for a summer based novel.

About the author…

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, ‘Mr Mercedes’, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both ‘Mr Mercedes’ and ‘End Of Watch’ received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.

King co-wrote the bestselling novel ‘Sleeping Beauties‘ with his son Owen King, and many of King’s books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including ‘The Shawshank Redemption‘, ‘Gerald’s Game’ and ‘It‘.

King was the recipient of America’s prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine

Links-https://www.stephenking.com/

Twitter @StephenKing @HardCaseCrime