National Post (National Edition)
box of wonder
Stephen King plays to the pulp enthusiast in all of us with Joyland
Joyland By Stephen King Hard Case Crime 288 pp; $12.95
When I was growing up, the door to the bedroom next to mine was always closed, and came with my mother’s stern admonition, “Keep out of the storeroom; it’s messy enough as is.”
The combination of those two things was like an invitation to my younger brothers and I, the three of us all under the age of 10.
The room was a treasure house, full of boxes and baskets and secrets. I remember clothes and lamps and pots and pans. (Memory is a fungible thing — it’s very likely that the hanging macramé plantholders were actually in use in the living room below, not in the storage room as I remember. It was the ’70s, after all.)
We dove and dug and explored that room, and though we tried our best to return it to a semblance of order after our clandestine visits, it seems my mother was right: We did make a mess out of the place.
The greatest treasure in that room I quickly staked as my own: A cluster of boxes stacked on the now bare bunkbed frame. I remember climbing into the top bunk, my former bed, and cracking open the tops of those boxes on what must have been a weekly basis, rummaging through the treasures like a pirate at a gold-filled chest.
The boxes were full of books.
To this day, I don’t know where they came from; many of the books were too eclectic, too bizarre, to match up with what I thought I knew of my parents’ reading tastes, masses of battered paperbacks, pulpy and sharp-smelling with age, yellow and spine-broken. There were no hardcovers, save a few aging editions of The Friendship Book, and no literature, just stories by the boxful.
And I devoured them, slipping them out of the store room and into my bedroom a book or two at a time, as if my parents wouldn’t notice the increasingly high stacks, so long as the migration of the books was gradual, incremental.
I found my first Stephen King books in those boxes, a treasure trove of Agatha Christies and Erle Stanley Gardeners, romances, science fiction novels and westerns. I read them all. Some of them repeatedly. Many of them, actually. There was something about those books, not just what was in them — the stories they held — but what they were, as objects. Who had read them before me? What did they think of them? How did they end up in these boxes? (Other mysteries, like who read Xaviera Hollander ’s The Happy Hooker so devotedly that it fell open all on its own to certain key passages, I’ve decided not to dwell upon.)
Readers — and writers — will often extol the virtues of beloved libraries and bookstores. I can’t disagree, but for me, my love of reading — and, therefore, my life, really — began with those boxes of books.
From there, it was an inexorable slide into the fullblown pulp addiction. Whenever I had a dollar or two, I’d ride my bike into town to the thrift store or the junk shop and buy as many books as my pocket change would allow: tawdry ’50s and ’ 60s mysteries and science fiction novels, Ellery Queen and The Worm Ouroboros, the original Pan James Bonds and back issues of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. While other dreaming-of-being-writers-kids were reading Tom Sawyer and Jane Austen, I was following the adventures of master-spy Nick Carter, revenge-drivenMafia-hunter The Executioner, cowboy-cum-cocksman Longarm, along with Mickey Spillaine’s Mike Hammer novels and the ’60s vintage paperbacks of Kurt Vonnegut. I haunted every used bookstore I had access to, buying books by the armload, retreating to a darkened corner to get my fix.
I eventually read the classics — and I have the degree to prove it — but it was the first few years of reading, that discovery of those pulpy wonders, that shaped me. I believe it was for the better. That sense of discovery seems to be at the heart of Stephen King’s decision not to release his latest novel, Joyland, as an ebook. “[I] loved the paperbacks I grew up with as a kid,” King says in a statement on Amazon.com, “and for that reason, we’re going to hold off on e-publishing this one for the time being.” (“We”, in this case, is King and Hard Case Crime, a small publisher devoted to the values of the traditional pulp novel, right down to the garish, painted covers.)
Not surprisingly, it’s not a popular stand, with ebook readers reviling the decision (which was also made to support bricks-and-mortar booksellers), lodging one-star reviews on Amazon and taking to message boards to express their petulant disapproval. Some are vowing to never read the book unless they get their way and the book is published electronically.
Well, that’s their loss, and a fairly significant one: Joyland is a small marvel of a book, a novel of loss and heartbreak, of growth and discovery, a book that combines a coming- of-age story with a mystery, supernatural elements with keen human intimacy, all leavened with King’s trademark salt-of-the-earth grace and aplomb.
Set in 1973, Joyland follows Devin Jones, a college student, recently dumped by his first love, as he takes a summer job at a second-tier amusement park. Joyland isn’t much in comparison to Disney World, but it makes people happy, and his work serves as a balm for his battered heart.
This is a Stephen King book, so of course the haunted house is really haunted, by the ghost of a young woman murdered in the ride several years earlier, but that’s almost beside the point. Joyland is a novel of character, a bittersweet paean to lost love, lost time, and lost youth, a coming-of-age story steeped in sadness (and undeniable tension) with an overarching tone of redemption and catharsis.
Despite the garish cover and Hard Case Crime’s usual fare of “hard-boiled” fiction, there’s nothing garish or pulpy about Joyland. Rather, it stands with such shorter King masterpieces as The Body and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption as one of the writer’s finest works, a highlight in a career that has had so many.
And it gives me great pleasure to think that some years down the road, some 10-year-old somewhere is going to open a dusty box in a forbidden room and pull out a battered copy of Joyland. Drawn in by the garish cover, the tacky tagline (“Who Dares Enter the FUNHOUSE OF FEAR?”), he or she will retreat to their own bedroom, pull the covers up, turn on their flashlights and change their lives.
Because that’s exactly how it happens.