The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
I have a yellowed used bookstore copy of Joyland. It was published in 2013 and set in 1973.
This novel has Stephen King’s signature style of crime fiction with supernatural elements. We have ghosts and a kid with special sight.
There is a great personal narrative for the main character and his friends complete with coming of age and the literary weight of an extraordinary person in ordinary circumstances mixed with the genre weight of an ordinary person in extraordinary circumstances. An interesting ghost story. A good mystery. There are some perfectly set diversions and misleads along the way. The story has a solid ending which is a big deal for a Stephen King story. I believe the novel benefitted from the shorter, more-compact format of the Hard Case Crime books.
I am convinced that Joyland is in the top ten of Stephen King books I’ve read so far, which is most of them, and that the novel might be his most underrated book.
Beautiful foreshadowing in answering whether the main character saw “him.” Our first person narrator admits “I did and I didn’t. The explanation will have to wait a while.”
Fortuna is a name we have seen recently in Stephen King novels. She was an injured nun in The Wind Through the Keyhole. Now, Fortuna is used for the fortuneteller in Joyland. She’s not the only one who sees more than others and not even the one who sees best.
First loves and broken hearts leave deep scars. With all the supernatural and crime fiction that defines this story, it is our narrator’s personal growth and discovery that hold the novel together.
Joyland is the first park to go nonsmoking and in tobacco-rich 1970s North Carolina no less. As forward thinking as they are, they can also see their days are numbered due to big corporate parks.
Several South Carolina locations just up the road from me are mentioned as the story unfolds.
“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.” Great line.
Professor Nako’s office is a good bit of business in the novel.
There is a Hogwarts/ Harry Potter reference in the novel. Our narrator rereads the Lord of the Rings books in his spare time.
A clothes pen on the penis is mentioned by one character to upset another. This has come up more than once in King’s work. It was also used to define the broken nature of a villain in the Hulu small screen version of 11/22/63 in place of some of the details in the novel.
This novel is pretty close to perfect in its pace and story beats. It’s a concise narrative that still feels like there is a lot of room for the story to breathe. The Green Mile might be the closest to a perfect novel Stephen King has written. Joyland isn’t far behind and deserves a lot more attention than it has gotten, especially from Stephen King fans.
My next post in this series will be Before The Dark Man which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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