- Author
- Stephen King
- Title
- Joyland
- Translator
- -
- Publisher
- Titan, 2013
- Info
- 288 pages, £7.99
Let down by the end of his first love story, Devin, a college student, accepts a seasonal job in a small-town amusement park, where a ghost seems to be living.
An unusual King, who puts the thrilling atmospheres and tensions of the best-known novels aside to delicately tell the story of a young man who becomes a man through the usual passages between pains and joys, typical of the end of adolescence. In narrating Devin’s and his first, burning sentimental disappointment, King also evokes the portrait of a simple America, in which the amusement park was the destination dreamed a whole year by children who were happy with a funny hat and a hot dog, and in which the sense of human solidarity is still very strong: the true terror, the one that doesn’t fail to appear, is represented by contempt, not at all supernatural, for the life and for the hopes of others.
Poetic, intimate and melancholic, it is not easily framed compared to the rest of the American author’s production, nor does it stands out for its originality, but it turns out to be a nice surprise for its ability to fascinate and engage.
Translation by Francesca Crea and Alice Gazzaroli, edited by Jenovia Amisti Smith
Francesca Crea and Alice Gazzaroli are students of the Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Letters faculty at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Brescia, Italy; they collaborate with Inkroci in the translation project coordinated by Professor Jenovia Amisti Smith.
