Joyride

There’s an endorsement on the front cover of Joyride by Stephen King, which begs the question, why isn’t Jack Ketchum more popular?

Probably because he’s pretty nasty, goes places that other authors don’t usually dare, recounts events that are hard to stomach and embraces topics that we often avoid, while at the same time being a very talented author with great storytelling skills.

Is this why a book as good as this only gets 2942 ratings and 388 reviews on Goodreads?

It also doesn’t help that Joyride is hard to find - try getting a Kindle version on Amazon, for example - and like many other Jack Ketchum books has been practically banished from the public eye, certainly isn’t available in libraries, and generally doesn’t exist.

A splatterpunk tag is loosely appended to the book to let us know that action gets quickly out of hand and remains that way, and the reason I’ve given Joyride 5 stars is because it stays 99% true to itself and keeps within realistic storytelling boundaries to the end, no matter how exaggerated and sometimes improbable it becomes, reading closer to true crime than a broad splatterpunk categorization.

Joyride is what I hoped Rage by Stephen King would be like - depicting gruesome murders and gory action, rather than a psychological cross slice into society and how students deal with the repercussions.

Jack Ketchum does a brilliant job of taking the bad guy and turning him into the victim, ultimately rooting for people you had every reason to dislike. It’s a slice of psychological genius that delves into the mind of a psycho killer who believes he’s just as vulnerable as everybody else.

Although Joyride is pretty much a crime thriller with gruesome appendages, it showcases Jack Ketchum at his gory best and after a few weaker books such as The Lost, is a great return to form if you enjoy this type of fiction.