Joyland

Joyland (2013) is the second in Stephen King’s hard-boiled detective collection published by Hard Case Crime.

King has written more than 80 full-length novels in addition to 20 novellas, over 120 short stories, and 5 nonfiction books. He has won more than 30 awards for his fiction. His books and short stories have been made into 39 films and 13 television series (with more in planning).

This guide references the 2013 paperback edition.

Content Warning: The novel features suicidal ideation, explicit sexual language, and murder.

Plot Summary

The narrator, Devin Jones, looks back 40 years on the summer of 1973, when at 21, he takes a summer job at Joyland, an independent amusement park in North Carolina. The day of his interview, he meets Madame Fortuna, the palm reader, who tells him he will meet two children—a girl with a red hat and a boy with a dog, and one of them will have second sight. She adds that Devin is on the edge of great sorrow and possibly danger.

Devin also meets Lane Hardy, the Ferris wheel operator, who tells him about a murder that happened at the park’s house of horrors ride four years earlier and that Madame Fortuna (aka Rozzie Gold) won’t go near the Horror House at all, much less inside, because she believes it is haunted.