57. Joyland
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Stephen King
Genre: Fiction, Thiller
283 pages, published June 4, 2013
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
Joyland takes place in 1973 at a North Carolina amusement park which was the site of a vicious murder of a young woman in the “Haunted House.” Devin Jones, a student at the University of New Hampshire, takes a summer job at Joyland in North Carolina and is told by the resident fortune teller that he will meet two children that summer, a girl with a red hat and a boy with a dog, and that one of them has The Sight. Jones becomes close to Annie, a single mother, and her disabled son Mike. Devin finds that he has a talent for “wearing the fur,” Joyland-talk for portraying Howie the Happy Hound, Joyland’s mascot. One day, he saves a young girl in a red hat from choking on a park hot dog. Devin later discovers that Mike is the child with “The Sight.” Devin and his friends start investigating a string of unsolved murders that they believe are related to the Joyland murder. It all comes together on a dark and stormy night at Joyland.
Quotes
“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”
“This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wake up nights.”
“All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I’m blue — when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day — I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn’t always a butcher’s game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they are precious.”
“I’m not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles. Part of me still wants to know what was wrong with me. What I was lacking.”
“When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re fucking lost.”
“My father had taught me – mostly by example – that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.”
“The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.”
“Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they’ve got right on their side.”
“Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down – a thing not always easy to do. “Son, do you know what history is?” “Uh…stuff that happened in the past?” “Nope,” he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. “History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap. Right now, we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who’s destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.”
“We could see other fires–great leaping bonfires as well as cooking fires–all the way down the beach to the twinkling metropolis of Joyland. They made a lovely chain of burning jewelry. Such fires are probably illegal in the twenty-first century; the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people. I don’t know why that should be, I only know it is.”
My Take
Joyland is a fun, page turning read; the perfect summer vacation book. I have a soft spot for Stephen King, an author I have read since my teenage years and whose books I have always enjoyed. King knows how to both spin an engrossing tale and create characters who you care about and who seem flesh and blood real. He does both in Joyland and I am happy to recommend this book.
