56 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingJoyland
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: The Hard-Boiled Ghost Story
King has been a prolific and popular writer since the 1970s. King is best known as a horror writer, but his strong characterization and use of setting and mood have created a crossover appeal to readers who aren’t normally interested in the horror genre. He writes across many genres, including horror, supernatural, suspense, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy, often blurring boundaries between one genre and another.
Joyland is one of three novels published by Hard Case Crime, a publisher of stories that take a new approach to the traditional hard-boiled detective genre. The classic hard-boiled detective story leans toward a stark, unsentimental view of the world. Settings tend to be urban and grim. Joyland departs from the tradition by setting the story in an amusement park in a seaside town. King uses the park as an urban landscape, set apart from the rest of the world by its own private language and culture. The amusement park represents a magical world in which ghosts and fortune tellers can exist, but Joyland is also solidly planted in the real world and described in gritty, unflinchingly realistic terms.
King’s direct and concrete voice invokes one of the most distinctive characteristics of the hard-boiled genre while he turns other traditional features on their heads, creating a coming-of-age story that appeals to readers of both hard-boiled crime and horror.
The average hard-boiled detective tends to be a cynical loner and outsider with a well-concealed heart of gold that compels him to see justice done, especially where he sees a woman in peril. In Joyland, Devin, the protagonist, is a sweet-natured college student nursing a broken heart and inspired by curiosity to investigate the murder of a young woman that took place in the park years earlier.
Joyland is not so much horror as it is a ghost story. The evil in the story rises entirely from the human corruption that is typically the focus of hard-boiled crime. The lurking presence of an unseen serial killer is perfectly in keeping with the hard-boiled genre. The ghost story element of Joyland dovetails with the hard-boiled detective genre in that it also relies on a realistic or hyper-realistic view of the world—into which is inserted a supernatural element.
Literary Context: The Coming-of-Age Story
The hard-boiled detective story and the ghost story are both examples of genre. Genre is defined by details of setting, the source of conflict, and the nature of the antagonist. Joyland is a coming-of-age novel. Coming-of-age isn’t a genre in itself. It is a type of story arc that can apply to virtually any story in any genre.
The coming-of-age story differs from other growing-up story types in that it takes place over a relatively short period of time—in this case only a few months. It concludes with a transformational experience in which the protagonist takes a leap of understanding into the adult world. This transformative experience divides the protagonist’s life into a distinct before and after. For Devin, the transformational experience occurs when Mike releases Linda’s trapped spirit from the Horror House and Devin confronts her murderer.
The archetypal coming-of-age is represented in fairy tales when the youth is ejected from his home and sent out into an unfamiliar world to make his fortune. The youth in such stories is typically represented as naïve, foolish, or ignorant. He may even have a given name like “Fumbling” or “Simple Simon.” Although not foolish, Devin is certainly naive. He fails to see Wendy as she truly is, and he is completely deceived by Lane.
The coming-of-age may take place at any time in the protagonist’s life, as long as the protagonist is relatively young, anywhere from 11 to 25. If it occurs later, it is a delayed coming-of-age, which deals not with the young person’s normal transformation from child to adult but rather with the reasons why the protagonist hasn’t grown up. At 21, Devin can’t afford to remain a child much longer.
Literary Context: The Island of Misfit Boys
Coming-of-age and growing-up stories often take place in a special magical world. In fairy tales, this might be represented by the woods, by a giant’s country at the top of the beanstalk or by a faraway kingdom. Modern stories have employed the device of a land of eternal childhood from which the child must voluntarily walk away in order to become an adult. Never Never Land is a version of the same archetype—where lost boys play all day and never grow up.
The name of the amusement park, Joyland, recalls the song from the German operetta Toyland (1903). The story weaves together several fairy tales and their characters. The title song refers to Toyland as “childhood’s joyland,” and the theme is childhood and coming-of-age: “[O]nce you pass its borders, you can never return again.”
Toyland is also the name of the island amusement park in the story of Pinocchio. There, children play all day and never grow up (the Disney version of the story calls it Pleasure Island). In Pinocchio’s story, the consequence of refusing to grow up is a life of slavery. More recently, Guillermo Del Toro produced a stop-motion adaptation in which “Toyland” is represented as a Nazi youth training camp.
William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies takes a still darker view than Pleasure Island or Never Never Land. Both Golding and Del Toro were reacting to the crimes of Nazi Germany. Golding shows what he thinks would really happen if a group of children was left alone on an isolated island without adult supervision. In Golding’s vision, the boys fail to come of age and instead devolve into sadistic, superstitious tribes. In Del Toro’s version of Pleasure Island, both Pinocchio and his friend Candlewick refuse to be broken by the Nazi conditioning.
In Joyland, King accepts the potential failure to come of age but provides his central character with the tools and circumstances he needs to fulfill his transition into adulthood.
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