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Joyland (2013)


Before reading: Joyland is the second story King put out under the crime/noir Hard Case Crime books after The Colorado Kid. I ended up liking TCK more than I expected to so I'm hopeful for this one. I know literally nothing about the plot but I do enjoy a little palette cleanser. 

After reading: This is quite a short book so sadly this will be quite a short review. 

This book, along with King's other Hard Case Crime stories, are some of the rare ones that have absolutely nothing to do with other King books. Yes, there are mentions of Maine in this one, but if you're just a crime/noir genre fan, you could completely read this as your first King book. 

However...is this a crime book? I don't know, I guess technically it is butttttt. Going into this expecting a mystery/crime story, I was pretty disappointed. Let's start with the positives.

This is Stephen King. The characters are great, the setting is detailed and immersive, the prose is great, and the story has a lot of heart. Therefore, at the end of the day, this is good. Also, like I mentioned before, it's pretty short. I don't think anyone is going to read this book and hate it.

Now onto the not so positive stuff. This book doesn't really turn into a crime thriller until the last 75% of the book. The majority of this book builds up to it, yes, but it is basically just a story about a guy. King does this a lot, but I think it works better when he's writing a 800-1000 page book. You can kind of forgive all of the backstory when a book is super long. Because this one was shorter, it became a story about a character that kind of randomly turned into an action movie at the very end. Also, this book has supernatural elements. Maybe it's just me, but I don't want my crime novel to be supernatural. It took me out of the genre.

Well. That's all I've got to say about that. Was it a good book? Yeah it was. I wouldn't read it again and I didn't particularly enjoy it. I don't regret reading it but I'm more than ready to move onto the next.

Speaking up, next up is Doctor Sleep which is super exciting. 

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