Stephen King’s interview, “On Growing Up, Believing in God and Getting Scared”, can be read and listened to HERE. Stephen also reads an excerpt from his new novel, Joyland.
King’s new thriller is set in North Carolina in 1973. Joyland has a horror house and a torture chamber, but it’s not exactly a horror novel. The park’s fun house may be haunted by a ghost — which may explain the dead bodies — but the book isn’t exactly a supernatural thriller, either. Instead, the book combines elements of crime, horror and the supernatural. The main character is a college student who aspires to write for The New Yorker. After his heart is broken by his girlfriend, he wants to get away from New England and takes a job in North Carolina, at the Joyland amusement park, where he enters a different world.
The book will be published on June 4th by Hard Case Crime. “Joyland is a throwback to the books that I loved as a kid,” King says. “We lived way out in the country, and my mother would go once a week shopping, and she would go to the Red & White or the A&P to pick up her groceries. And I would immediately beat feet to Robert’s Drugstore, where they had a couple of those turn-around wire racks with the hard-boiled paperbacks that usually featured a girl with scanty clothing on the front. … The teaser line that I always loved the most was for a novel called Liz where it said, ‘She hit the gutter and bounced lower.’ … I loved that, and the one on the front of Joyland says” — he lowers his voice — ” ‘Who dares enter the funhouse of fear?’ “