Plano Reads: Joyland

The Brown Bag Book Club will meet in person at Parr Library, at noon, on Thursday, November 17 to discuss Joyland by Stephen King.

Joyland by Stephen King

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Joyland follows Devin Jones, a sixty-year-old man, as he looks back at the summer, he became an adult.  In 1973 Devin is a broken-hearted college student.  He decides to spend his vacation working at Joyland, a quaint carnival with rigged games and old-fashioned rides.  But like all good carnivals, this one comes with its own mystery.  There are rumors of a ghost in the haunted house ride.  The ghost began to appear around the time Linda Gray, a young woman, was murdered in the haunted house; her murderer was never caught.  Perhaps…the rumors go…the murderer isn’t just still at large…perhaps they are lurking nearby.  Stephen King, a peerless storyteller, presents a fine noir story with a dash of horror.  It’s a satisfying experience.

“More a coming-of-age mystery than a horror-filled thriller, it’s closer to the tone of King’s short story ‘The Body’ – on which the film Stand By Me is based – than it is to the author’s real forays into horror, and all the more intriguing for it” – The Guardian

“A haunted carnival funhouse gives a supernatural spin to events in Thriller Award–winner King’s period murder mystery with a heart.” – Publisher’s Weekly

“As ever, King writes a lean sentence and a textured story, joining mystery to horror, always with an indignant sense of just how depraved people can be. The story is all the scarier, toward the end, not by the revelation of the bad guy but by his perfectly ordinary desires, even though Joyland is anything but an ordinary place… A satisfyingly warped yarn, kissing cousins of Blue Velvet. Readers may be inclined to stay off the Tilt-a-Whirl for a while after diving into these pages.” – Kirkus

Stephen King is a prolific author in multiple genres but is most identified with horror.  Joyland is part of a series in noir style published under the Hard Case Crime imprint.