About.com Rating



Titan Publishing Company, 2013

With its lurid cover featuring a beautiful but frightened red-haired woman with a heaving bosom, Joyland conjures the best of hard-driving pulp fiction. Its powerful evocation of carnival (carny) life transported me to the carnival that came to my small Southern town in the 1950s. Among the usual activities, a quarter, a princely sum to us kids then, we were allowed to view the principal attraction, a man in an iron lung.

It was the height of the polio scare and carnivals have always been good at building on the latest trend. Things have not changed greatly in the business.

Stephen King eschews emphasis on the supernatural in this instance and builds a pulse-pounding murder mystery set in 1973. There is a ghost, but she makes minimal appearances; rather, she is a specter that lurks in the background. And, there is a young boy with muscular dystrophy who has the "sight" and is able to see her. At its heart, however, this is a murder mystery, a love story, and a coming-of-age story. It all hangs together beautifully.

Devin Jones, now in his sixties, recalls the summer he turned twenty-one and how his life changed. He comes to Heaven's Bay, a fictional beach near Wilmington, NC. King's current series, Under the Dome, is being filmed there so he is familiar with the area. Dev is a virgin whose long-time girlfriend breaks up with him over the summer. He has left Maine and college for work in a carnival next to the beach where he meets Madame Fortuna, the carnival's fortune teller, who tells him, "There's a shadow over you, young man."

The cast of characters is finely drawn: Emmalina Shoplaw, from whom he rents a room; Bradley Easterbook, the aging owner of the carnival; Freddy Dean, the manager of Joyland; and Lane Hardy, who teaches Dev how to work the rides.

Two other college students working there for the summer play a significant role, Erin Cook and Tom Kennedy. Later he meets Annie Ross and her son Mike, who is twelve and has muscular dystrophy.

Linda Gray was a small town girl who came to the carnival years before and was brutally murdered in one of the rides. The unsolved case weighs on Dev's mind. On a slow day, he and his friends, Erin and Tom, take the ride into the Horror House where Tom sees the ghost but will not talk about it. Dev enlists the assistance of Erin who sends him newspaper clippings and photos after she returns to college in the fall. The photos point to someone, but Dev cannot quite put it together. This often trite construct is built into a potent bit of escalating tension.

King has created a genuine world with nods to real small towns in the area. This world contains plausible horror and joy. Everything that happens could happen; nothing seems out of the ordinary, even the appearance of Linda Gray's ghost or those who have second sight. The carnival and its lingo add a basis of reality. In a very nice touch to a writer who surely influenced King, he created the Manly Wellman Show of 1,000 Wonders. The late Manly Wellman was very real, a superb and much-loved teacher of writing at the University of North Carolina and a very prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy stories, many of which were published in the pulp magazines.

Joyland is part of Titan Publishing Company's Hard Case Crime series. The series "brings you the best in hard-boiled crime fiction, from lost pulp classics to new work…" and features authors such as Donald Westlake, Richard Stark, and Ariel Winter.



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