By Stephen King
288 pages
( Hard Case Crime;
First Edition June 4, 2013)
ISBN-10: 1781162646
ISBN-13: 978-1781162644
Stephen King is not primarily known as a mystery writer.
According to his website, Stephen
King.com, only a handful of the 45 novels he has written deal with crime (Dolores
Claiborne, Misery, The Colorado Kid, etc.) and one of
those is his prison drama, The Green Mile, which is less a
mystery than a study of human good and evil with a supernatural twist.
Nonetheless, when King writes a whodunit, he writes a good
one. And his latest, Joyland, released as a Hard Case
Crime imprint in June, is one of his best.
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| Stephen King, known for his horror stories, is a dab hand with whodunits, too! |
The novel is told from the point of view of Devin Jones, a college
student who takes a summer job at Joyland, a beachfront North Carolina
amusement park that has seen better days.
There is no Madeleine's sweet scent
to spark the story, no "best of times" or "worst of times:"
The narrative unfolds with Jones as a much older man, reminiscing in the first
person about events that occurred many
years before. He plunges directly into his story without any artifice, the way
a stranger might during an impromptu conversation in a small town coffee shop.
The reader quickly learns Jones is a down-and-out scholar at
a New England college who needs summer employment to continue his education. He
answers a help-wanted ad he spots in a magazine and wins the job as a "dog's body" -- literally at times -- who keep's the place going.
Hanging over Devin's head is the depressing fact that he is being
dumped by his girlfriend, Wendy. The break-up leaves him morose and mildly
suicidal, with a tendency to sit in his boarding house bedroom listening to doleful
tunes such as "The End" by Jim Morrison. As Devin puts it himself a little more than a dozen pages into the book:
"I was a twenty-one year-old virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey shorts, a clunker Ford with a good radio, occasional suicidal ideations, and a broken heart."
"Sweet, huh?"
At Joyland, Jones quickly becomes a favorite among most of
the park's staff and customers -- particularly after he heroically saves the
life of a little girl choking on a piece of hot dog and gives CPR to a
long-time park staffer who is dying from an incapacitating heart attack.
The only supernatural element of the story is revealed during Devin's first visit to the park: Joyland is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a young woman whose throat was slashed by a mysterious attacker in the "horror house," a creepy ride that is often used as a make-out spot by Joyland's teenaged patrons.
Despite the fact that the killer appears with his victim on at least two pictures that were taken by the park's photographers on the day of the murder, he left no other clues and the crime remains unsolved four years later.
As the summer winds on, Devin makes a number of friends who
will end up playing a significant role in the story: he is taken under the wing
of the park's elderly owner; another senior staffer becomes his protector and shows
him the ropes; he becomes close to two college-age kids who also have been
hired to work at the park, Erin and Tom; his landlady fills him in on local
lore and the town librarian gives him information about the mysterious murder;
finally, Devin develops a relationship with a crippled boy
and mother, Mike and Annie, that will change his life -- and help him resolve his depression
over his romantic breakup.
All the characters are deftly sketched and portrayed with a
vivid and loving touch. Even relatively minor figures get King's undivided
attention.
Part of the book's charm is that it leaves the reader with
the sense that he or she actually knows these people. It seems strange to say
but even though Joyland is only 288 pages long, it seems longer; King manages
to pack more than a summer's worth of action into less than 300 pages, yet
readers will finish the book wishing for more.
In addition, King makes good use of the amusement park and
midway slang he puts in his characters' mouths.
Some of this argot is legit, taken directly from reference works about
carny lingo. Quite a bit of it was simply invited by King, himself. Whether
real or facsimile, all of his terminology is served up in a way that lets the
reader know what it means, and it adds layers of verisimilitude to his story
and believability to his characters.
Much of Joyland deals with Devin's recovery
from his derailed first romance and his relationship with his workmates and the
crippled child, Mike. But the engine that keeps the novel moving forward is the
"whodunit" -- the grisly murder that occurred in the amusement park's
"horror house." Devin becomes obsessed by a gruesome desire to see the
slain girl's ghost and figure out who killed her; Erin is disturbed by the crime
and its supposedly supernatural twist; Surprisingly, even Tom -- the most
skeptical and hard-headed of the young trio -- is shocked and changed forever
by the killing and its apparent connection to the otherworldly.
By the final pages, Devin gathers enough clues to unmask the
villain. The solution to the mystery is not one of those cheapies where key
facts are withheld until the bad guy is revealed: King arranges all the
evidence as if challenging his readers to identify the culprit. But Joyland
is not one of those novels where unmasking the villain is a critical part of
the fun.
Instead, the novel is like a trip through the park's chamber
of horrors: in Joyland, you will find that just enjoying the ride provides a
bigger thrill than you'd get from winning a cheesy prize at one of the park's
concession stands. And trust me: you, like Devin Jones, will find the
experience haunting.
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