Joyride

Joyride
by Jack Ketchum

I did not care for this book. I don’t think the reader is supposed to. To paraphrase Mr. Weaver, I think disliking this book only indicates that I am still sane.

Wayne Lock didn’t interest me. His back story was cheap and tacked on (“oh, hang on, we need a reason for the crazy. Make his mom a nutter. There, that’s good enough”). He was physically weak, childish at times, and self centered. The God-complex and Love-with-a-capital-L he develops in the final chapter might be realistic psychologically speaking, but it didn’t fit his depiction in the rest of the novel.

Another issue is that this book really doesn’t give you anyone to root for. I wanted to feel sorry for Carole, but somehow that was difficult. The extent of her abuse was hard to process--it was too much, and I thought of her more as a character that the author decided to heap abuse on than as a real person. There wasn’t anything to her other than the abuse. Lee, likewise, was more of a shell than a realized character. He was ineffectual at pretty much everything. When Lock finally shot him, my response was “oh, finally.”

Lt. Rule spends so much time duffing around that it’s easy to dislike him. His scenes with the psychiatrist may have made him a more realistic character, but it also made him an ineffective one. He’s whining about a failed relationship while this murderer is killing half the town. His character in particular reminded me of Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. But whereas Bell comes off as a realistic portrayal of a cop trying to make sense of senseless horror, Rule seemed almost like a caricature. His hopeful ending felt phony.

There were other things working against this piece. I have a hard time with sexual assault in general, and reading about it in this kind of lurid detail was almost as much fun as the spider-monster book I had to read last semester. Elements of the plot played out more like a B-movie than a book. The final murder spree, for example, struck me as basically a less hilarious version of this. All the details from the victims’ POV about how full of hope and possibility their lives were was repetitive and heavy-handed. Lock’s mother was a cliche.

Ultimately, I found the story of Wayne Lock and his victims lurid. The subject matter is grotesque and ultimately uninteresting.

Which, taken by itself, is kind of interesting. Why don't I find this as interesting as other horror books? Why is Hannibal Lecter more fascinating than Wayne Lock? I think it has to do with character. Lecter is more about the man, his reasons for what he does, his beliefs and ideas and thoughts. Lock is about the act. The focus of this book is on what he does, the gritty details of the murders and the torture and the rapes. At the end of the book we know almost nothing about Lock, other than he’s crazy. Admittedly, that was the point of the book -- people do evil, horrible things for no reason. But without characters we actually care about, it wasn’t enough to carry the novel.