

King falls flat in delivering anything worth reading, with a sluggish plot driven solely by an unconvincing narrator. Rather, he melds his skillful knack for horror writing with an old-fashioned noir aesthetic. Despite his repetition of Jamie’s mantra about this being a horror story, King does not deliver the gut-wrenching scares he has in the past. He does not intend to use this knowledge, but the people closest to him take advantage of his abilities for personal gain. As a boy, Jamie discovers that he can talk to the ghosts of the recently deceased through this, he learns that the dead cannot tell lies.

A rookie newspaperwoman learns the true meaning of mystery when she investigates a 25-year-old unsolved and very strange case involving a dead man found on an island off the coast of Maine. 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 in a fairground and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.

It will also feature three exclusive art cards with alternate cover artwork for the three novels. This includes The Colorado Kid (2005), Joyland (2013) and Later (2021).

Collecting Stephen King's three homages to the classic crime pulp paperbacks, published by Hard Case Crime. The Complete Hard Case Crime Stephen King Collection, featuring the bestselling titles The Colorado Kid, Joyland, and his newest novel, Later, plus exclusive art cards.
