Joyride – Stephen Crye

Pinnacle – 1983

The fact that a book is hard to find is often enough to make me want to read it. This was the case with Joyride. I knew affordable copies are scarce, and I think I had even seen people mention it fondly. When I saw a copy the other day, I jumped at the chance to read it.

I didn’t like it.

A group of teenagers decide to party in a cemetery. Unbeknownst to them, the man who works at the graveyard is a hideously mutilated psychopath. As the teens start spreading out, he starts picking them off, dismembering one with a scythe, setting fire to another, and decapitating another with a chainsaw. Once the killing starts, there’s not many directions the story can go, and the rest of the book is rather underwhelming.

There’s a backstory given to the murderer, and while it explains his inability to regulate his saliva output, I felt like it passed over a few of the transitional stages between high-school loser and outright murderous ghoul.

This is a “slasher”, and although I hadn’t ever thought about it much before, Joyride convinced me that I don’t like slashers very much. It reminded me a little bit of David Robbin’s dreadful Hell- O-Ween. Joyride was a little bit better than that piece of shit, but the only real tension here comes from not knowing how the next teenager is going to be murdered. At least it’s short, and I was able to finish it in 2 sittings. If it had been any longer, I probably would have hated it.