Around 2012, Stephen King had an idea for a book. It was a small book, grafting an image he’d had 20 years ago (a kid in a wheelchair on a beach flying a kite) to his urge to write about carnivals. Set in 1973, it was kind of a mystery, but mostly a coming-of-age story about a college kid “finding his feet after a heartbreak.” It wasn’t the kind of book his publisher, Simon & Schuster, wanted. They liked big fat books, like Doctor Sleep, King’s sequel to The Shining coming out later in 2013. So King returned to the scene of the (Hard Case) Crime and published it with the folks who’d previously handled his other slim, not-really-a-horror-or-a-mystery novel, The Colorado Kid. Also returning was Glen Orbik handling cover duties, best known for reproducing the lush, fully-painted style of pulp paperbacks for everything from movie posters, to comic books, to the California Bar Association.
Hard Case Crime specializes in publishing books that aren’t what they appear. Everything they release, from Stephen King to Max Allan Collins, gets a painted cover that makes it look like old school, disreputable pulp no matter what the contents. That made it a good fit for both The Colorado Kid and Joyland, since neither is what it appears, either. The Colorado Kid barely even had a story and was, instead, a philosophical logic problem that doubled as a rumination on the failures of storytelling and the power of mysteries. Joyland looks like a thriller and even reads a bit like a thriller with its haunted funhouses, carny talk, psychic children, and serial killers, but it’s mostly about an emo college kid getting dumped.
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