Hoping to escape from her abusive ex-husband, a woman and her lover successfully carry out their plot to murder him, only to find themselves at the mercy of an obsessive, twisted stranger who witnessed the crime. (www.goodreads.com)
I've been to Paris for 2 days. To get there I took the train which gave me plenty of time to read up especially since me and my husband decided to leave our almost 2year old with her grandparents so we could get a little time to ourselves since she's the wonder of my world, but a tiring wonder at that.
On the train to and from Paris I decided to read Joyride by Jack Ketchum. I've read Off Season by him and The Girl next door is standing on my bookshelf.
Joyride is a disturbing tale about a couple who's being taken hostage by a lunatic who has seen them in the act of murdering someone. Thinking that they are like him, he approaches the couple and takes them on a murder spree across the country.
You get an inside on the couple, Lee and Carole, how they are trying to get away from an abusing ex-husband when the legal system lets them down and how they are terrorized by a lunatic who happens to have seen them when they were at their worst.
But you also get an inside scoop on Wayne, the looney whose main dream has been murdering someone, taking retaliation on those doing him wrong. All his life he's been terrorized by his father and then consequently by his emotionally lacking mother. When he's finally living alone he starts writing everything down what's offensive to him. I varies from a barking dog to a surname he particularly finds distasteful.
When he finally kills someone he doesn't want to stop. He's cold in his calculations and ends up killing a whole lot of people.
What I also liked in this novel, is that with every person he kills, you get a short view into what brought them to that place in that time. Kind of a remembrance of the victim, making them more real instead of them being cannon fodder to help the story line along.
Joyride isn't faultless but it's a very interesting read. Although, through the more hardcore parts of the novel I always thought that it was just a novel. I writer's words can't hurt you or anyone else. Then I read the afterword and I realised that his main character has been made out of 2 very real men who have done what's described in the novel. That is enough to raise the hairs on your arms and look at this novel in a whole other way.
In the back of the novel there was a 40 page short story by the same author. You'd think it would be about some killer species of plants reading the title, but no way in hell.
I started to read this last night, a few pages before I went to bed and those pages kept me up a while. So much that I almost turned on the light again because I wanted to know what would happen, if she would be okay.
It's a story about a couple that does the most atrocious things to young females before killing them. Even involving their own family. My stomach turned while I read this little story and I'm very difficult to shock.
Jack Ketchum is a writer you should avoid when you're not used to read about the most vilest of us all, because such people do exist and he's not affraid to put them in the spotlight.
My personal score: 4 stars
