Joyride: A Review

I surprisingly really enjoyed Joyride by John Ketchum. It was gripping and I kept racing to the next page at times. I read the entire novel in one night. That doesn’t usually happen. There was a multitude of characters including the main characters: Lee, Carole, and Wayne, as well as secondary characters: Susan and Rule. I found way more pros than cons for this novel and I thought it was a great depiction of a killer.

The biggest con I had were all of the scenes involving rape and sexual assaults. I feel uncomfortable reading scenes like these so they were hard to get through at times. But since it was a big part of the novel, they were kind of necessary. Kind of.

The other con I had was that at times it was hard to determine who Ketchum was speaking about. He talked about multiple men in the same paragraph and only said: “he”. I had to reread the passages because it was unclear on who he was talking about. At times I thought Lee was doing terrible acts until I realized it was Howard or Wayne. Ketchum could’ve used their names a little more. Or maybe it was operator error.

But, let’s talk about the pros. All of the characters were well-developed and stood out from one another. I think a big part of this was because Ketchum switched heads a lot. We got inside the mind of almost all of the characters, including the boy who found Howard’s body. I loved that. By doing that, we were also able to get inside the unstable mind of Wayne.

Speaking of Wayne, I thought he made for a great depiction of a killer. He was massively unstable even before he watched Lee and Carole murder her ex-husband. He kept a hit list. He planned out his killing spree. I mean, he knew the exact route he was going to go, he got a motel room for the night, and he planned for complications. Not to mention the body count he piled up before he was killed. I’m just glad he didn’t kill Susan in the beginning. There needed to be some survivors. I felt so sad when Lee died.

I especially liked getting inside Wayne’s mind because we knew how he thought and how unstable he was. In the beginning, when he was trying to build up the courage to kill Susan, we understood how long he desired to kill someone. How seeing Howard’s murder spurned him to actually kill. How once he saw Lee and Carole enter the bar-that was it. For fiction, he was a good killer. The end surprised and disturbed me. He didn’t even care who he killed, he just needed to kill. And he actually thought he’d get away with it.

Although, I think Wayne fit the bill for spree killer more than serial killer. He killed almost a dozen people at different locations but all within a single time period. Most serial killers take time before murders. Wayne’s motive: kill. It didn’t matter who he killed as long as he killed. He didn’t think about his little hit list until the end of the novel when he started killing his neighbors. He didn’t think about gender or age, he didn’t discriminate as he chose his victims. They were simply innocent people caught at the wrong place and time.

Overall, it was a great and terrifying book. The survivors will always think about the terrible things that happened and it’s a book that’ll stay with you for a little while. Anyone could be writing your name down in a book and if they ever build up their courage-you could be their next victim.