The resulting portrait of Joyland in action is absorbing enough, all by itself, to sustain a full-length narrative. As King takes Devin and his fellow “Happy Helpers” through their daily rounds - hauling trash, stocking shelves with gimcrack prizes, cleaning up vomit, hawking souvenir photographs - he opens up this world and gives it a tangible reality.

King immerses us in the peculiar reality of Joyland, with its rituals, its pecking order, its rich variety of characters and its unique language. His ability to convey the raw, instantly recognizable emotions of a vulnerable young man is one of the novel’s unobtrusive strengths.Įqually convincing is his meticulous re-creation of life within the insular society of a mid-level amusement park. King treats this crisis with profound and unforced empathy.

Early on, he is unceremoniously dumped by his long-time college girlfriend. Devin’s emotions are, for the most part, turbulent. King pays close attention to everything, from the emotional weather of his protagonist to the1,001 details in the day-to-day life of a working carny. Within that Bradbury-like setting, King has created a moving, immensely appealing coming-of-age tale that encompasses restless ghosts, serial murder, psychic phenomena and sexual initiation.Īs in so much of King’s work, quotidian details pervade the narrative, providing a solid foundation for the dramatic, sometimes otherworldly events. Devin spent that summer as an apprentice carny at Joyland, a family-owned amusement park struggling to survive in a rapidly changing world. The narrator is Devin Jones, a 60-something writer looking back on the summer of 1973, when he was 21 years old. “Joyland” is, in many respects, a different sort of book, but it, too, depends on King’s typically unerring sense of character for its deepest effects. The first was “The Colorado Kid” (2005), which serves, somewhat loosely, as the basis for the TV series “Haven.” A slight but memorable departure - for King and for Hard Case Crime - the novel offered a gentle, character-driven narrative notable for its deliberate lack of resolution. “Joyland” is the second paperback original that Stephen King has released with Hard Case Crime, a small publisher specializing in new and vintage crime fiction of the classically hardboiled variety.

Joyland by Stephen King