Reading Joyland hurts. It is a book that might just worm its way into your soul and leave a piece of itself there. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’ll say so, this often overlooked gem of Stephen Kings, is like mainlining a shot of weltschmerzen, a word here meaning the German phrase for the feeling of general sadness you can’t really find a direction for. It is a thoroughly beautiful book, but it’s a sad beauty. For every wonderful moment, you feel you’ve earned it, along with the main character, Devin: recently out of his first year at college and broken up with by his first love, the seemingly McGuffined, Wendy Keegan.
Perhaps some of the reason I love this story so much, is the age I read it, just finishing my A-levels and getting out of college, my university all picked out for after the summer break, which at that point still seemed a long way off. I could identify with the main character in a way I couldn’t with the Losers Club from IT, he was my age, he was going through the same things I was, big life changes and breakups. However, don’t take that to mean you can only love Joyland if you’re a teenager, Joyland is about life. There are no murderous sewer clowns, no demonic charity shops, just a guy looking back on the best and worst year of his life, puzzling over all the good things that happened, all the things that tore him up inside, the things he’d hold on to forever. We can all relate to the way Devin talks about his time working at Joyland, we all have pain that clings to us, but we also have the good times we’ll never let go, and that’s what makes the story so stunning, Stephen king presents us with the beauty and the sorrow in life and we see ourselves reflected in it.
For all these reasons, I’ll go out on a limb and call Joyland my favourite Stephen king story, despite my love for his other works. It just has a gut punch to it, one the others admittedly have too, the fate of the losers club when they finally corner pennywise, John Marienville staying down in the mine in Desperation, but none of them are so concentrated, or earnest, as Joyland.
Joyland is more than the story of a young mans coming of age, working at a carnival. It’s Stephen king weighing up existence, love and loss and all the miles in between, for all the wonder and all the horror, and reminding us that, though things may sometimes be awful, we carry the hard won memories of the good times with us, and they can never be taken away.
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