This was the one review I didn’t want to write.
It’s not that I’m going to shit all over Joyride. I can’t
say that the book was a pleasant reading experience but it was undeniably well
done. It’s got prose like a British sitcom, where the camera just stays at one
place and unflinchingly describes the ugliness placed in front of it.
I think I’ve been twitchy about writing this one because
Jack Ketchum is part of the horror orthodoxy. He’s one of those dudes people
just get behind and if I say anything negative I’m afraid
I’ll lose my horror bonafides. It’s not that I have anything particularly
negative to say about the guy other than his work is nearly the textbook
definition of a crapsack world.
Crapsack worlds, as defined by tvtropes.org, is a fictional
universe where everything is absolutely miserable. Usually it refers to a
post-apocalyptic setting and often there are either zombies or robots or
something running around, but Joyride takes place in a
crapsack version of the human condition. Everyone sucks, everyone is poisoned
by hate or madness, and you can murder your abusive husband in cold blood with
your lover and still remain the “hero” of the story.
A lot of horror fiction, especially horror fiction without
any overt supernatural elements, takes place in crapsack worlds. I can’t stand
the tone of these stories. They feel like thinly veiled misanthropy. I don’t
know Jack Ketchum in the way that a lot of people in the program do. For all I
know, he’s a lovely human being who is kind to puppies and dotes over little
old ladies in their hour of need. But it feels like writing from someone who
sees very little light in the human condition.
Which, of course, means that he writes the best overtly
vicious psychopath we’ve encountered in the course of the semester. Up until
this point Francis Dolarhyde has been my favorite looney. He’s kind of a cop
out. He’s easy to like. We feel sad for him, we hope he’s successful in
fighting off the urges of the Red Dragon, and his murders aren’t jammed in our
faces.
Wayne Lock’s mania is jammed right into our faces. We’re not
meant to like him. But he’s brilliantly constructed.
Joyride feels like one of those old EC
Comics morality tales where the scheming couple bumps off the husband, only to
have him riiiiiiise up from the grave to seek vengeance. The story has been
updated and the husband really does have it coming (though, frankly, I saw a
million different ways she could have gotten away without killing the guy) but
instead of the shambling drippy skeleton we get some misogynistic loon with a
grudge against everyone. The basic message remains the same: if you step out of
line, there will be horrible consequences.
**********************
Wayne Lock feels less grandiose than Dolarhyde. He’s less
intelligent and a whole lot more petty and a whole lot more believable. As I
recognized my insecurities in Dolarhyde, I recognize my idiot rages in Lock.
It’s not hard at times to feel like people are against you and there’s reason
to keep track of those grievances. But most of us shrug our shoulders and get
over it. Lock seems like rage writ large, the kind of person with a permanent
‘fuck you’ mentality. It makes sense that he’d become entranced with the
violence he sees. A guy like him builds kill lists as a way to vent, then
discovers how easy it actually is to hurt people if you have no conscious and a
whole lot of entitlement issues.
So he’s a well-designed psycho, but he’s really the only
compelling character in the book. I read it months ago and I don’t remember
anything about the couple, other than the fact that I wasn’t sympathetic toward
them. It’s hard to sell me on cold blooded murderers, no matter how righteous
their cause.
I also thought that the book was really centered around the
climactic massacre. The back cover of the book sold it as a story of two
‘righteous’ murderers who find themselves trapped in a rolling massacre with a
nutjob. That stuff is scary. Some of my favorite tense scenes in movies are the
bits where a crazy person is in the back seat of a car, being half-playful and
half-threatening to the scared people driving. It’s the ultimate hitchhiker
story. That whole hook feels discarded midway through and the story ends in a
gigantic setpiece where the wackadoo goes blasting through the neighborhood
only to get gunned down by Johnny Law. It’s incredibly well-executed (har de
har harrrr….) but it feels like it could be a short story in its own. It fits
what came before but doesn’t necessarily follow, if that makes sense.
**********************
Before I finish this post, I want to stress that I don’t
think this was a bad book. Jack Ketchum is a really, really
good writer and I’ve enjoyed other things he’s written tremendously. I even
“enjoyed” reading Joyride. If just feels like a world view I
can’t particularly subscribe to.
I’ve been grinding through Silent Hill 2
over the past week as I’ve written this. It’s a supernatural story and it’s one
of the scariest things I’ve every encountered, but it’s also a lovely story of
grief and guilt and it takes place in a world where the horror of the
supernatural contrasts the mundane joys and awfulness of regular life.
The crapsack world of a lot of horror fiction is a place
where everything is terrible. Every family is dysfunctional behind closed
doors, the mildest mouse can turn into the biggest monster, and everything is
two hours and a hot meal away from falling apart. It’s the kind of attitude
that feels immature to me. It’s myopic and limited, the world of heavy metal
album covers and sullen teenagers. It’s probably not the effect Ketchum wanted
the reader to take away from the story, but it’s what I pulled from it. Maybe I’m
more interested in what I had to say rather than what the book did.
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