(pb;
1983)
From
the back cover
“Nine
teenagers venture into All Saints Hill Cemetery one evening in search of a
quiet place to get drunk, stoned, and naked. Watching from a tool shed is
Cleats, the hideously scarred caretaker who thinks the cars contain his
tormentors from six years ago. Cleats locks the gates, gathers his tools and
goes hunting. Any poor soul straying too far from the party runs into the wrong
end of a sickle, chainsaw, pick-axe, or icepick.”
Review
Joyride is
a slasher-flick book: its fast-moving, well-written scenes are cinematic, and
visually splashy in gory and non-gory ways: many of the characters are
unlikeable and lack nuance; it also has the tension, gratuitous sex and blunt
violence one would expect from such a work.
One of
the things that thrilled me about Joyride
was that its killer, Robert Atchison (a.k.a. Cleats), was not always a psycho
killer, as shown in the book’s flashback chapters. Atchison is a fully realized
person with a (semi-)relatable motive for slaughtering these often-obnoxious
and stupid adolescents.
I
enjoyed this book a lot. I would recommend it to anyone who likes slasher
movies.
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