Friday, February 21, 2014

Joyride by Stephen Crye



(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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