Hey, why not right?

Joyland - Stephen King
I gotta admit, I thought this was going to be more of a hardboiled detective novel then it actually was. Softboiled. I am not really the biggest fan of King when he goes sentimental. I prefer him in his William Castle mode, a bright eyed huckster spinning EC Comic style horrors. So I had really high hopes here, cause the setting and the material seemed ripe for a Carnival of Souls type horror thriller. But in actuality it is more like Adventureland crossed with his usual psychic moppets. That being said there is a lot to like. I wish he had actually gone harder on the older protagonist remembering his halcyon days, cause that was easily the strongest part of the novel. A mixed bag, but like usual it goes down like candy.

The Yiddish Policeman's Ball - Michael Chabon
I read The Adventures of Kavilier and Clay last month and loved it, but I only got it out of the library cause I had originally wanted to read this. Set in an alt history where the Israeli government was overthrown in the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, leading to the center of the Jewish diaspora being an Alaskan enclave that was formed post WW2 as a temporary Hong Kong styled outpost for refugees, set to revert back to the United States during the book's events, the book is a Raymond Chandler styled detective story, involving the murder of a messianic figure and the cop who is piecing together the conspiratorial tapestry as his world falls apart. Sickenly relevant again with the Palestinian massacre happening in the world right now. Found it excellent, even when it made me feel sick!

Reading a lot of Junji Ito cause tis the season. I got Tombs and Lovesickness from the library this week. One of the funnier things about his work is how much it relies on a variation on "have you heard about this strange custom in this town? yeah it's the most fucked up thing to ever happen. hope it's not you!" The extra funny part is that the probability of it working for me or not is about the same as a coin flip.

The titular story in Tombs, for instance, struck me as strangely poignant. I like the guilt of the hit and run seeping into the lives of the two siblings, and the ways that turned to paranoia as the plot went on. A kind of riff on The Tell Tale Heart, but with the supernatural becoming literal instead of psychological. Even just the image of the corpses turning into tombs is powerful, and the final reveal of the family is chilling in a way Ito often misses in his attempt to find scary. Thoroughly enjoyed.

On the other hand, you have the setup of Lovesickness and it's crossroads fortune obsessed town. Maybe it's just the fact it's a longer story, I probably would think better of the whole thing if it was just the first chapter. But it draws out the entire thing so much that not only does the metaphor lose it's punch but the meat and potatoes scares are lessened as well. I much rather would have read him expanding more on "The Bizarre Hikizuri Siblings," which seemed like his version of The Addams Family. His attempt at humor is sometimes real hit and miss (One of the stories in Tombs, "The Window Next Door," feels like an attempt at horror comedy that missed me completely. He really is the Japanese Stephen King, and that's his Lawnmower Man. {The short story about a goat man eating a lawn, not the Pierce Brosnan VR movie, though that is a classic in it's own right!}) but the Hikizura Siblings grabbed me. I'd check in on their miserable adventures every week.

I'm planning on getting his version of Frankenstein next time I go to the library, which I have read before and consider one of the best adaptations of Shelley's novel, as well as his illustrated version of No Longer Human. Maybe I'll even read Uzumaki for the upteenth time. This is what spooky season is all about, after all.