Joyland

Stephen King is one of those authors that I would read any of his books. They are, while not particularly dense, certainly entertaining. Joyland is no exception. While it was not a serious or science fiction-y as the last Stephen King book I read (11/22/63), it was still a fun, vacation style read.

The book takes place at an amusement park and, in traditional Stephen King fashion there is a certain amount of the supernatural. Though I thought that the supernatural bits were unnecessary and the story would have been better and perhaps even scarier without them.

I found the main character pretty likable with his mixed bag of failures and successes but really the most enjoyable part of the book was simply the setting. It is clear that the author put in a lot of time researching carnivals and amusement parks for the writing of this book. Just like 11/22/63, the research clearly shows in the attention to detail of the carnie lifestyle. Parts of the book don’t even feel like a Stephen King story; they could have been in some sort of carnival novel.

I think one of the main things that I will take away from this book is how adaptable a writer King is. He has put out a huge number of books but the last couple of his that I have read show a huge amount of effort and care put into them. The fact that one of the bestselling authors of all time does this shows how much he cares about writing as a craft.

Overall, I would give this story an 82%.

11/22/63

I first heard about 11/22/63 from an interview with Stephen King at the end of one of the first Gunslinger comics (I know, I am a nerd).  I do not remember exactly what the question was but it was something about other ideas for comic stories and he described a story about someone who goes back in time to save JFK and comes back to the present to find it ruined and he then has to go back in time again to stop himself from saving JFK.  This concept intrigued me and when I saw that he had made a book based on it, I told myself that I would read it when I got the chance. 

Without giving too much away, I will say that the plot of 11/22/63 does not follow that original idea very closely.  Despite this I greatly enjoyed the book.  The way that it handled time travel was relatively unique and historical detail was great.  The book did lose its way a little in the middle, but it finished strong and was certainly an enjoyable read.

The way that time travel works in this book is interesting and different from any other version of time travel I can think of having seen.  In this there is one time portal that always goes back to exactly the same time and people always come out two minutes after they go in.  The author avoids the problem of all the time travellers running into each other right outside the portal by having the world undergo a reset each time.  Therefore any change that is important has to be the last time the portal is ever used.

The afterword implies that Stephen King has gone a boatload of research for this book, and it shows.  The level of historical detail that he put in is sometimes staggering.  It is easy to believe that the characters are in the 50's and 60's because the author puts in so much effort to make the elements of story really seem like it.

The middle of the book seemed to get a little off message.  The portal opens in 1958 and the reason for not just compacting the story by a year seems unclear.  I feel like the whole plot makes sense if there is one less year for it to happen in but I am sure that Stephen King had his reasons.  Despite this, when the book nears its climax, it becomes almost impossible to put down  The sense of urgency is fantastically done. 

It is interesting to compare this to Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis, which was featured on this blog last year.  That book had a team of time travellers and they all worked together and they went to WWII.  This book had a single time traveller going to the 50's and it seems much more (if this word can be used to describe a time travel story) realistic.  In 11/22/63, the protagonist makes  multiple gaffes where he uses slang and makes other references to things that take place after the time he is in while in Blackout/All Clear, the closest thing to that is them discussing what is going to be bombed when.  I would say that Blackout/All Clear is better written but Stephen King makes the reader feel more like a time traveller.

Overall, I would give this book a 94%.

The Wind Through the Keyhole

When I was significantly younger, my uncle lent my mother a copy of Stephen King's The Gunslinger as an audiobook on the way back from New Jersey.  About 45 minutes in there was a sex scene and my mother shut it off (I cannot really blame her.  I am not sure that I would want to listen to a sex scene with my single digit age child).  However, the idea of a cowboy trekking across a desert stuck with me.  Then when I was in high school, I went through a phase where I would spend a lot of time at the local library reading whatever piqued my interest.  There I found The Gunslinger again and all the other books in the Dark Tower series.  I found the series greatly entertaining despite some of its flaws and the protagonist, Roland, was a hero I could get behind, especially in the fourth book Wizard and Glass which recounts an adventure from his younger days.  In addition, the way that the series ends in book seven was really, at the time, quite novel to me.

In March of last year, Stephen King, one of the most prolific authors, announced that he was going to be producing a book to come in between the 4th and 5th books in the time line entitled The Wind Through the Keyhole.  My initial reaction was excitement because I am a sucker for a continuing story.  My love of the Star Wars canon probably stems in a large part from the fact that it is one long continuing story.  However, that was overtaken by trepidation, was this just some publicity trick?  It has been a while since I read the series, but I don't remember much space between 4 and 5.  However, being the faithful fan, I preordered it and avoided most of the information about it.

When I finally read it, I realized that it had a very interesting format.  There is a frame story about the series' protagonists listening to Roland tell a story about his younger days.  However, as part of that story, he tells a story he heard as a child to someone else and the readers must dutifully follow him into a frame story within a frame story and then back out, one level at a time.  (kinda Inception-esque)  Not that this is bad, but I am not sure that I have ever read a book with (relatively long) stories three layers deep.

I thought that the story that was at the middle level was significantly better than the other two and wished that it had been fleshed out more.  On reading, it is pretty obvious that the deepest story is the one that he really wanted to tell but he wanted to tie it to characters that people would recognize from the other books.

If you are a fan of Stephen King in general and are picking this up to read something in his style, I would not recommend it.  It is more like his normal fare than the other Dark Tower books but it is certainly not horror or even suspense.  If you are hoping for a normal science fiction or fantasy story, however, this really isn't one of those either. There are a lot of things that go pretty much unexplained unless you have read the other books (and some that are weird even if you have).  However, if you liked the world of the Dark Tower, this a great reminder of what it was like.  Little things like the lexicon and the way that certain events happened were a great throwback to the last time that I read them and brought me many happy memories.

Perhaps this will get more people interested in the Dark Tower series but I cannot honestly believe that it will.  If someone was interested in reading the Dark Tower series, I would definitely hand them The Gunslinger first without even thinking about The Wind Through the Keyhole.  It is the difference between teaching someone to swim in a wading pool or in the deep end with weights on their legs.

In short, if you enjoyed the Dark Tower, you probably owe this a read.  If you are interested in the Dark Tower, read at least the first four books first, if not the seven who have come out before this.  I would give this book a 79%.