Joyland

A one time voracious reader of Stephen King, the last thing he wrote that I held to read was "Lisey's Story" and I never really got into it. I've left King behind for the last, I don't know, I guess close to a decade. For how much I loved so much of what he wrote, I found myself hating some choices he made, I didn't like the direction the fabled "Dark tower" series took, and had grown weary of his excessive verbosity; so I took a much needed break.

I had been recently thinking about maybe picking something up by him again and the other day, I was at the Wellesley town library and saw "Joyland" sitting there. The cover was all I really needed, plus the fact that it wasn't 800 pages. The whole look of the paperback had a very old timey, dime store novel feel, turns out, that was the intent.

I finished the book this afternoon, and I am not certain if I can recommend it or not. I can say that what I liked about it, I loved, really loved. But, there were things I didn't love, in fact, things I really hated. Right off the bat, it took almost a third of the book before the story even began. Almost one hundred pages in building characters that were irrelevant or developing main characters that could have been done in a third the space. For me, this is a chronic King condition - and it really makes me mental.

In the end, I loved the actual story, but it seemed disjointed at times trying to find itself within the intended genre while blurring the lines from what the name Stephen King invokes just upon hearing it. I don't feel like I wasted my time reading this, I really like a few of the main characters and their interactions but I am not sold on how the story was told.

Your choice.