Stephen King - Joyland (Unabridged)

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Stephen King: Joyland [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
Read by Michael Kelly
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Author............: Stephen King
Narrator..........: Michael Kelly
Book..............: Joyland
Listening Length..: 7 hours and 33 minutes
Program Type......: Audiobook
Version...........: Unabridged
Publisher.........: Simon & Schuster Audio
Release Date......: June 4, 2013
Language..........: English
ASIN..............: B00CTSPI62
Source............: Audible Audio Edition
Genre.............: Horror, Mystery & Thrillers
Tracks............: 57
Codec.............: MPEG Audio layer 1/2/3 (mpga)
Quality...........: 64 kbps / 44.1KHz / Joint-Stereo

http://www.amazon.com/Joyland/dp/B00CTSPI62/ref=tmm_aud_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1371285970&sr=1-1

Release Notes:
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Book Description

ΓÇ£Joyland is a breathtaking, beautiful, heartbreaking book....Even the most hardboiled readers will find themselves movedΓÇ¥ (Charles Ardai, Edgar- and Shamus Award-winning editor of Hard Case Crime).

Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever. Joyland is a brand-new novel and has never previously been published.

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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2013: What a smart, sweet, spooky, sexy gem of a story. In this one-off for the Hard Case Crime publishing imprint, King has found yet another outlet and format (print only, a280 pages) to suit his considerable talents. All are on full display here in the story of Devon Jones--"a twenty-one-year-old virgin with literary aspirations … and a broken heart"--who spends the summer of 1973 at Joyland amusement park in North Carolina. Devon makes new pals, proves himself to the hard-core carny workers, saves a girl’s life, befriends a dying boy (who has a secret gift), and falls for the boy’s protective, beautiful mother. The first half of the story is sweet and nostalgic, with modest hints of menace to come. (Think: “The Body,” King’s novella that became the film Stand By Me.) Devon learns to “sell fun” and “wear the fur” (carny-speak for dressing as Howie the Happy Hound, the park mascot), but he also learns about the woman who had been killed in the Funhouse, whose ghost still haunts Joyland. King has fun with the carny lingo--most of it researched and real, some of it invented. (The Ferris wheel, for example, is the chump-hoister.) The second half gets spookier, spinning into a full-on murder mystery--but also a love story, and a coming-of-age-story, with some supernatural fun woven in. More than a trifecta, this is King at his narrative and nostalgic best. A single-session tale to savor some summer afternoon. And then try not to keep thinking back on it. --Neal Thompson --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Review
"This oneΓÇÖs a must for King fans and may also attract YA readers." ΓÇô Library Journal

"...period murder mystery with a heart...King brings his usual finesse to this taleΓÇÖs mystery elements" ΓÇô Publishers Weekly

"...the book...features some of King's most graceful writing...ruminative, amused, digressive, marvelously unaffected, and finally, devastatingly sad." ΓÇô Entertainment Weekly

"An amusement park and murder figure into a coming-of-age tale in this miniature thriller with a hint of the supernatural." ΓÇô Los Angeles Times

“Undeniable…charm [and] aching nostalgia…[JOYLAND] reads like a heartfelt memoir and might be King’s gentlest book, a canny channeling of the inner peace one can find within outer tumult.” – Booklist

"Wrapped in a gloriously pulpy cover, Joyland is a coming-of-age story set in 1973 at a North Carolina amusement park -- creepy! -- that's haunted by a murderer." ΓÇô Time Magazine

"Stephen King's carny-saturated Joyland evokes the ghosts of summers past -- literally." ΓÇô New York Magazine

For the most part there are no chapter markers on the discs, and thus the tracklist below don't list chapters either.




“Joyland” is the second paperback original that Stephen King has released with Hard Case Crime, a small publisher specializing in new and vintage crime fiction of the classically hardboiled variety. The first was “The Colorado Kid” (2005), which serves, somewhat loosely, as the basis for the TV series “Haven.” A slight but memorable departure — for King and for Hard Case Crime — the novel offered a gentle, character-driven narrative notable for its deliberate lack of resolution.

“Joyland” is, in many respects, a different sort of book, but it, too, depends on King’s typically unerring sense of character for its deepest effects. The narrator is Devin Jones, a 60-something writer looking back on the summer of 1973, when he was 21 years old. Devin spent that summer as an apprentice carny at Joyland, a family-owned amusement park struggling to survive in a rapidly changing world. Within that Bradbury-like setting, King has created a moving, immensely appealing coming-of-age tale that encompasses restless ghosts, serial murder, psychic phenomena and sexual initiation.

As in so much of King’s work, quotidian details pervade the narrative, providing a solid foundation for the dramatic, sometimes otherworldly events. King pays close attention to everything, from the emotional weather of his protagonist to the1,001 details in the day-to-day life of a working carny. Devin’s emotions are, for the most part, turbulent. Early on, he is unceremoniously dumped by his long-time college girlfriend. King treats this crisis with profound and unforced empathy. His ability to convey the raw, instantly recognizable emotions of a vulnerable young man is one of the novel’s unobtrusive strengths.

Equally convincing is his meticulous re-creation of life within the insular society of a mid-level amusement park. King immerses us in the peculiar reality of Joyland, with its rituals, its pecking order, its rich variety of characters and its unique language. As King takes Devin and his fellow “Happy Helpers” through their daily rounds — hauling trash, stocking shelves with gimcrack prizes, cleaning up vomit, hawking souvenir photographs — he opens up this world and gives it a tangible reality. The resulting portrait of Joyland in action is absorbing enough, all by itself, to sustain a full-length narrative. This, however, is a Stephen King novel, and so a darker, more menacing reality eventually asserts itself.

This begins with the story of Linda Gray, a young woman who was murdered at Joyland. What might have been a grisly but distant event becomes more immediate when a skeptical friend of Devin’s sees what he believes to be her ghost. The story takes on greater import when research reveals the existence of a pattern linking several murdered girls to a series of amusement parks and traveling carnivals — places just like Joyland. Suddenly, the richly detailed coming-of-age tale becomes a serial-killer story with supernatural overtones. Intrigued by the possible existence of a ghost and still struggling with his emotional baggage, Devin elects to stay at Joyland past the season’s end, hoping for a glimpse of the ethereal Linda Gray.

About this time, Devin makes two crucial new acquaintances: Mike Ross and his fiercely protective mother, Annie. Young Mike has a fatal form of muscular dystrophy and is also subject to puzzling psychic flashes. Annie is, among other things, a crack rifle shot. As these various elements come together in a stormy climax, the mysteries of Joyland gradually come clear.

The melodramatic aspects of the story are great fun, but the real strength of “Joyland” stems from King’s ability to connect with his characters directly and viscerally. It’s that emotional bond that marks the difference between books that merely entertain and books that matter in a fundamental way. With deceptive ease and astonishing regularity, King has been writing stories that matter for nearly 40 years. In “Joyland,” he has done it once again.