It’s an image which immediately calls to mind the kind of lurking terror that King has become renowned for, but also the pulp genre of hardboiled detectives and cigarette stained mysteries hammered out by the likes of Donald Westlake and Raymond Chandler.
No wonder. This is another instalment in Titan Book’s ‘Hard Case Crime’ series, for which King has written before (2005’s The Colorado Kid, which quickly grew up to become TV’s Haven). But there are none of the rain-washed streets and trilbies laid down next to half empty bourbon bottles as a name like ‘Hard Case Crime’ may suggest.
Joyland contains a crime as brutal and gaudy as you’d find in any Mickey Spillane story – a young woman’s throat cut inside a haunted house – but this is a murder mystery hidden inside a coming of age story, and it wouldn’t be King without a vaguely supernatural presence binding it all together.
1973, and lovesick college everyman Devin Jones takes a summer job at the amusement park Joyland, the last bastion of 1950s old-fashioned good times in a land of increasingly Disneyfied corporate fun. Amid the carnies and ‘conies’ (King has showman’s knack for making up fairground lingo), he’s drawn into the history of the park’s gruesome murder, but also the existences of the people he works with. The quietly cooling apple pie lives of small town America, the normality of which serves to enhance the shockingness of the crime.
From the point at which Devin narrates all this to us he is an old man, lathed down by experience and reflecting on a time when he was innocent to the point of naivety. It’s a narrative style that those who’ve read King’s novella The Body (or just seen Family Guy‘s parody of it) will recognise: a tale told in retrospect but sprinkled with asides to the present and the current state of Devin Jones’ life. It lends itself well to the nostalgia for a lost age that the Joyland amusement park has built its rides and reputation on.
Joyland is a straightforward murder mystery, and one which King imbues with his own patented shivers here and there to keep you on your toes. But that’s only one aspect of a story which is much deeper, more personal, and ultimately far more emotional than you expect it to be. Devin Jones is no ragged P.I., and neither are the readers following his journey. If you can make it through all 283 pages without feeling your tear ducts moistening, then you might be more hardboiled than even the stoniest detective.
Published on Friday 7 June by Titan Books / Hard Case Crime.
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