Joyland - Stephen King

 It's the summer of '73 and student Devin Jones has taken a seasonal job at an old-fashioned funfair in North Carolina.  Dev has just been dumped by his steady girlfriend and throws himself into the life of a greenhorn carny.  But the House of Horror ride was the scene of a mystery death and homes, according to those with a psychic bent, a real horror.

It must have been around the mid-70s when I picked up King's debut novel Carrie.  For the next twenty years I read pretty much every one as it came out.  But IT kind of lost me and I hated the collaboration with Peter Straub - The Talisman, was it?  I think Dolores Claiborne (1992) was the last one I bought.  But I am a real fan of Hard Case Crime publications and when I realised that the soon-to-arrive Later was the third of three written specifically for HCC, I had to get one.

Joyland (2013) is the second of the three (the first is The Colorado Kid (2005)).  I romped through it.  King's plots got a little samey back in the day but the writing never paled.  He started as a writer pushing the envelope and has matured over forty-plus years into probably the best living writer of popular fiction.  The key is, he has never become small-minded or - despite his phenomenal sales and big-budget movie adaptations - in anyway arrogant.  He sets out to intrigue and entertain and he delivers every time.

In summary, Joyland is a coming-of-age story with an overarching mystery and a couple of substantial jolts of horror.  Because it is short - and King is the absolute master of the shorter form - it bowls along merrily right to the end.  It looks like I have some catching up with King to do.  I was always going to get Later when it comes out in the UK.  Looks like I might need to tide myself over with The Colorado Kid.

The Wine Dark Sea - Robert Aickman

With Aickman, the great Faber Finds print on demand service comes into his own.  By issuing three of his strange story collections as Finds, Faber were able to build sufficient interest to republish another collection in traditional form.

I had heard of Aickman, who is popular with cult writers like Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, and who was the grandson of the great Victorian horror writer Richard Marsh (author of The Beetle, 1897), but whose books are very hard to come by. This seems to be because he was a truly awkward sod.  Then I walked into my local Oxfam and there, on the classics shelf, were all three Faber Find collections, which I am now working my way through.

First off, Aickman has a unique flavour.  His stories are long - 30 pages or more, perhaps best defined as mini novellas - and not especially horrific.  Instead they are strange, just like he said they were.  His characters tend to be loners, outsiders, and we see generally see the world through their eyes.  The locations are incredibly varied - Greek island, Venice, industrial Yorkshire, Sweden, and that's just in this volume. There is often a thread of present-versus-past in which the present tends to come off worst.

There are eight stories here.  The first is the title piece - a tourist goes to a Greek island despite being warned off by the locals and finds himself embroiled in elemental forces personified.  To me it was obvious, not sufficiently strange and certainly nowhere near adequately erotic, albeit we have to remember Aickman died in 1981, in his mid-sixties, so "Wine Dark Sea" might have been hot stuff in its day.  The next story, "The Trains", was my favourite - two postwar young women hiking in Yorkshire have to take refuge in an isolated house.  The twist with the butler was very strange indeed, and I loved that Aickman doesn't bother explaining it.  The butler is called Beech, a tribute to the butler of the same name in Wodehouse's Blandings series - the stories are dotted with such little touches, which only increase the enjoyment.

Then it's "Your Tiny Hand is Frozen" about lonely people and the telephone, followed by "Growing Boys", exactly what it says on the tin and hugely enjoyable.  "The Fetch" and "The Inner Room" both feature hopeless fathers, which seems to be another Aickman trope.  The latter didn't quite work for me, albeit I loved it right up to the point at which it was supposed to become disturbing.  On the other hand, the woman who turned out to be the titular fetch was deeply disturbing and lingered round the back of my mind for some days.

Finally 'Never Visit Venice' and 'Into the Woods' were both English-abroad stories in which the locations play a key role.  Venice has become too associated with weird goings-on since Aickman wrote his contribution, so it has lost some of its force.  Again, though, the writing is good and engrossing.  'Into the Woods' is extremely strange and unsettling.  Such an odd idea to begin with - an asylum for insomniacs - which Aickman then builds on with a masterly touch.

The introduction is by Peter Straub.  He was big news in 1988 when this edition was first published.  He isn't now, and the introduction isn't worth the paper it's printed on.