By STEPHEN CRYE (Pinnacle Books; 1983)
The word for this book is fun. Dumb fun, yes, but fun, nonetheless. “Stephen Crye” is actually Ronald Francis Patrick, author of the unforgettably morbid funeral parlor set BEYOND THE THRESHOLD (1978). JOYRIDE is likewise heavily concerned with internment, being situated in a Northern California town in which “burial is the only industry and the dead outnumber the living five thousand to one.”
The premise will be familiar to fans of 1980s era slasher flicks (as portended by the back cover imprecation “Keep Repeating–IT’S ONLY A BOOK! IT’S ONLY A BOOK! IT’S ONLY A BOOK!” and the promise of it being “More Horrifying Than HALLOWEEN…More grisly Than FRIDAY THE 13TH”): nine hot-to-trot teenagers, whose ranks include a hot chick, a nerdette and a fat guy (nicknamed “Twinkie”), unwisely decide to hold a high school graduation soiree in the All Saints Hill Cemetery, beginning (as the prologue makes sure to inform us) on June 15 at 7:00 PM, and concluding at 12:00 AM.
The action commences with a dog getting beaten to death by an unseen someone. This individual is Cleats, a.k.a. Robert James Atchinson, the hideously deformed son of the cemetery caretaker. Cleats, as is revealed in a series of extended flashbacks, killed his father back in 1974, and underwent a horrific accident that occurred, ironically enough, on his last day of high school. Back in the here-and-now Cleats dispatches the intruders in his midst with an impressive variety of instruments: fire, axe, chainsaw, icepick, pitchfork, etc., and finds time to lock a young woman in his family crypt and place a severed head in the arms of a graveyard statue.
The nastiness is detailed with enormous relish (“Priscilla’s jaws flapped uncontrollably but emitted no sound as she watched her boyfriend’s skin sizzle and pop like frying bacon,” “He recoiled from the statue with huge, disbelieving eyes, holding the stub of his injured hand in front of his face as the tangled, shredded flesh began to spurt an arc of blood in the air”), although none of those descriptions come close to matching the murder-by-embalming-fluid climax of BEYOND THE THRESHOLD in sheer blood-curdling horror. Likewise, JOYRIDE overall falls far short of the earlier novel, although as started up front, it is damn fun, and a mighty fast read that won’t take you more than a few hours to get through.