Joyride

by Stephen Crye

A madman attempts to kill a group of teenagers, who are celebrating their high school graduation in an old cemetery

Genres: Horror, Collections

248 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published July 1, 1983

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a classic slasher you probably never heard of. A group of 9 young people want to have a party at All Saints Cemetery. What they don't know that Cleats, son of the former grounds keeper is on the loose not intending to save anything or anyone... will any of the youth survive? Cleats has quite a tragic history behind but beware if he's under a spell of black rage... here you'll find many horror motifs mixed into one novel, Jason (Friday 13th), Michael Myers (Halloween) and even a shot of Texas Chain Saw (you probably guess at what weapon I'm referring to). Cleats, aka Robert Atchinson, really is a terribly bad man. Society made him into a monster and this is his tale. Well, what a blast from the past. Fearful slasher story if there ever was one. A book you never read, a movie you never watched, a true lost pearl from the 80s. A Joyride into Terror. Highly recommended!

[Jack Tripper · Rating 4 out of 5]

"MORE HORRIFYING THAN HALLOWEEN. MORE GRISLY THAN FRIDAY THE 13TH." That's in big bold letters on the back, under the brief synopsis, and the two films referenced are about as good of a comparison as I could ever come up with. At first it seems like a typical slasher novel meant to cash in on the early 80s slasher movie craze, and it is in a way, but it's very well done, with non-stop tension and terror. The And Then There Were None in a locked graveyard setup was great, and it's strange these types of novels weren't more prominent back in the day, considering horror fiction in general was just as huge as slasher flicks at the time.

The cast includes all your typical teen stereotypes: the cool kid, his hot girlfriend, the nerd, the fat kid, the wimp, the "bitch," the goodie two-shoes, the tag-along younger brother/cousin (it literally changes throughout the book), etc, and that's about as deep as the characterization goes. They're all cruising around together late one night when they decide to sneak into a large cemetery, just to get high and drink a few beers. Little do they know there's an enormous, severely deformed psychopath for a caretaker, and he had some very bad experiences with these sorts of high-schoolers when he was growing up. So he locks the gate, and...

The story jumps back and forth between the terrified teens in the graveyard, and the past of the monstrous caretaker, and how he got to be the way he is. It's pretty much pedal to the metal the entire time, with no real moments to relax for a bit. The writing is plain and no-frills, though Crye does love his adverbs. Seemingly every action has an "ly" word attached to it. Everything is done "meekly, absently, brightly, intently, violently, adamantly," etc. Also, no one "says" anything. They exclaim, or inquire, or retort, or declare, or announce, or demand, or snap. I'm not usually bothered -- if I even notice -- by this type of thing, and it was no different here.

This is exactly what I'd been looking for with my last few Laymon reads. Whereas many of his slashers have a tendency to meander about willy-nilly, with no purpose, Joyride is non-stop horror. It's actually pretty gruesome for a pre-splatterpunk-era novel, but not quite to the level of Ketchum's and Laymon's novels from the same period. Which is fine by me, as I'm more interested in the fear and dread created by the seeming inevitability of the teens' situation, and Crye certainly knows what he's doing in that department. The pure terror and panic these teens experience seems pretty realistic, actually. There's no "Damn Brenda's hot, I can see her bra strap"-type thoughts. It's more like "Ohmygod what the hell is happening I'm going to die Hail Mary full of grace..."

I wonder if "Stephen Crye" was just a pseudonym, and if he has more stuff out there under a different name. Dear Stephen Crye (if you're out there): Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.*


4.0 Stars


*Homer Simpson

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1976, high schooler Robert Atchinson is relentlessly tormented by his peers, because of everything from his looks, to being the son of the cemetery caretaker. He is madly in love with his enemy's girlfriend, Carla, desperate to get a job away from the cemetery, sick and tired of taking care of his crippled father - Robert is just miserable.
The day of his graduation, Robert's classmates set up a juvenile prank, that Robert accidentally ends up in the middle of, leaving him horribly disfigured. He waits in anger for 6 whole years, hoping to get an apology from the kids... but that never comes.
1982 : 9 friends and classmates are driving around after graduation, looking for a place to celebrate and party - when one of them spots the cemetery. Dark, secluded and a bit creepy, it's deemed perfect. But the caretaker of this particular cemetery is not like other people; this is Robert's cemetery - and when he sees the kids loitering inside, he begins to have flashbacks of his classmates victimizing him. The time to forgive and forget is long gone; he no longer cares about getting an apology. Instead, he just wants to make them pay - and he will, if it's the last thing he ever does.
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This book was perfect for horror fans; short, sweet and to the point. The action starts right away, and lasts up to the very last page. Very entertaining, and really just a great slasher. I'm really glad I finally took the time to read the synopsis and buy a copy.

[Nate Dawg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is right up my alley; a classic slasher tale in a cemetery. Joyride came out during the Golden Age of slashers. This book perfectly uses the formula of a group of teens being picked off by a homicidal maniac. It’s a lot of fun!
4 bloody 🩸 🔪’s

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

When the suns light sputtered out and night descended, a dark shroud of unease fell over this part of the cemetary. The statues surrendered their gentle expressions and faint Renaissance smiles and seemed to leer menacingly from their imperious perches.....

A wonderful little slasher novel here that was probably overlooked due to all the bad horror novels of the time. (1983). If you love all those Friday the 13th and Halloween movies , you will dig this.
Several teens looking for fun one night in a graveyard with a psychopath living on the grounds proceeds to kill them off one at a time. But he must have CAAAARLA to himself!!!!!

[Unsolved ☕︎ Mystery · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think of this read like a R.L Stine novel but more violent, more gore.

A group of teens decide to trespass on a lonely graveyard one night.
They are celebrating their high school graduation.
An uninvited guest will be attending.

That first chapter was absolutely heart breaking. =(

[Jordan Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

On its own, Joyride isn't very good.

There's little to no explanation for things that happen and when those things do happen, they're pretty derivative and unoriginal.

But on the other hand, if you take this book at face value and appreciate that it's nothing more than a quick paced slasher, then it's actually a lot of fun. Fast, gory, and cliched as anything else in the genre, this is the perfect book to scratch that typical 80's niche-horror itch.

I didn't love this book by any means but I had fun reading it. Plus, as this book seems to be exceedingly hard to come by, it's a great addition to my collection, regardless of its quality of content.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good Friday The 13th type slasher novel. When in the 80's all the horror books were about possessed souls or good vs. evil. This was a good change from all that Steven King type terror.

[Brian G Berry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome novel! One of the best slashers I've come across- including what's available in cinema. Highly recommended!

[Marina Schnierer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a re-read for me. I don't re-read a lot of books but there are a few stand out favourites that I do like to re-read and this has become one of those. Although I have only given it 4 stars, not 5, I still consider it a favourite as its simple, gory fun. There isn't much to think about here. You have your usual characters with the teenagers looking for a fun time and the villain, in this case, a brutal, maniacal killer out for blood. This is a no holds barred blood fest and is a lot of fun. Highly recommended to read, especially if you are in a reading slump as I have been lately.

[Dustin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had fun with Joyride, which is written to basically be an 80's slasher film. That's a pretty common conceit nowadays, but for some reason during the 80's horror paperback heyday, coinciding with the 80's slasher movie boom, we didn't really get much overlap. Joyride is written in a bit of an amateurish fashion, and without any real character development (save for the killer's) so I can't say it was a great book. That said, being as many slasher films don't boast the greatest writing, or characters either, it's not a giant knock against the book. The author delivers grisly kills, and very fast pacing, and it's quick and to the point. A perfect read for this time of year.

[Lance Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun, quick, read which is perfect for fans of 80s slasher movies. Teens. Check. Doing the drugs. Check. Doing the sex. Check. Crazy killer going off on them. Check. Good times.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Featured in Paperbacks From Hell. About as close as you can get to a plotless slasher movie from the 80s in text form.

[Paula Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considering how popular slasher movies were in the 80s, it's surprising more similarly themed books weren't coming out at the time. Joyride is just like an 80s slasher movie in book form and it's a bit of a blast! The plot is simple. Nine teenagers sneak into an abandoned cemetery to celebrate their graduation. Unfortunately for them, the caretaker is Cleats, and he's got an almighty grudge against graduating teenagers!

The book wastes no time in getting down to the action! The teen characters engage in the usual teen slasher tropes - drinking, doing drugs and having sex, but it's not long before Cleats is gruesomely dispatching them one by one. The survivors scramble through the cemetery while he relentlessly stalks him. The action pauses every now and then to give us Cleats' history, and why exactly he hates graduating teenagers so much!

Characterisation is wafer thin, but that's okay. A little too much time is spent with final girl Priscilla trapped in a crypt. But I was never bored. I read this in one go!

Note: I recommend skipping the prologue. It contains the gratuitous, needlessly cruel and gruesome murder of a dog. Not reading the prologue won't affect your understanding of the rest of the book, which is otherwise a wonderfully trashy, 80s slasher style gorefest.

[Alexramdhanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joyride by Stephen Crye is a classic slasher novel in tradition with films like House On Sorority Row, Scream, The Burning and more. The novel is fast-paced and has numerous characters dying in disturbing, graphic and bloody ways. The novel keeps you on the edge of your seat and the kills are more brutal than anything you have seen in the typical eightie's slasher (i.e. Friday The 13th, Madman, The Burning etc.)

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fun 1980's style slasher movie in book form. This book is not deep or literary in any way. It's all plot propelled by rocket fuel. It's a 100% '80's slasher movie stereotype complete with a disfigured killer, horny teenagers, beer, weed and sex! Loads of fun and a brisk pleasurable read these last few chilly October nights! I felt like a 10 year old again watching my first slasher movie.

[Simon Logan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly enjoyable, the best original slasher novel I have read to date, a little gem.

Like a good Ramones song it doesn't hang about, just starts up, gets on with what we are there for, then ends once that is done without the needing for any unnecessary codas or meaningless fade-outs.

[Tim Vargulish · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really sleazy in a great way. Feels like a great unseen slasher straight out of the 80s. Quick fun read with plenty of great deaths, interesting back and forth storytelling that makes the villain a pretty compelling character. Definite recommend if you like grimey splatter horror.

[Scott Oliver · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book. Very much in the 1980s slasher movie mould.

It’s quite like the film ‘the burning’ and cropsy, if there wasn’t a film of this there should have been

[Mikepottz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Keep repeating its only a book written on the first page (awesome). Mud crustered steel capped boots, a man swinging a lead pipe smashes a dog's vertebrae. The dogs yelp like a human cry of pain. A bunch of mixed bag teenagers decide to have some drinking fun at night in a secluded cemetary. As one of the teenagers stumbles upon a dilapidated shack near the locked gate, a large figure appears and slices the girls ankle with a sickle, then decapitated her head and carries it by the hair to his shack and cuts the body like firewood. Another teenager balls deep in his girlfriend will have petrol thrown on him the match flames his burning flesh, bubbling, his girlfriend watches the skin sizzling and the pop of cooking bacon. Another teenager has his head split in two the content of brain and blood flapped over his shoulders. The killer is hideously scarred, nose, mouth unrecognisable a prank gone wrong when he was in high school. His anger gets him to grab a chainsaw and saw off the head, blood spurting, the headless body twitching. The back page reads more horrifying than halloween, more grisly than friday the 13th this really cashed in on the slasher craze. This book is awesome and so happy to finally have a copy in my collection.

[Steve Isaak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joyride is the book equivalent of a slasher flick. Its fast-moving, well-written scenes are cinematic, visually splashy in a gory and non-gory way; many of the characters are unlikeable and lack nuance (it's clear who the reader is meant to root for and who deserves reader hisses); and it has all the spooky atmosphere, gratuitous sex and blunt violence one would expect from an unhinged-killer-on-the-loose work.

One thing that really made me enjoy this novel was that its killer - Robert Atchinson, a.k.a. Cleats - wasn't always a murderous psycho, as shown in Joyride's flashback chapters: Atchinson is a fully realized person, with a (semi-)relatable motive for slaughtering these largely obnoxious and stupid adolescents.

I enjoyed this a lot. I'd recommend it to those who enjoy gory slasher films. If you don't like cinematic/written fare like this, avoid Joyride.

(Big thanks to erotica author TreSart L. Sioux for turning me on to this book!) =)

(This review originally appeared on the Reading & Writing By Pub Light site.)

[Douglas Castagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This read like a movie tie in for a slasher flick. That is the good part, the bad being the characters were all flat and while we get some dimension for the killer and background there lacks some motivational catalyst for these killings. These are not the children of the "tormentors" nor are they the tormentors themselves. The time frame is not long enough or short enough from the time of the "fateful act" that sent him on this path. That being said it is a fast moving and, at times, gory novel that is short and quick. Nevertheless, it left me wanting.

[Bozz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. It's basically a slasher movie. Very cliched setting but on the other hand it has decent characters and it's quite unpredictable regarding who you think will live or die. Only bad point is the uncalled for murder of a dog in the first chapter. It's there purely to shock and doesn't even adhere to the killers character. Totally pointless and in bad taste.

[Troy Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow I read this when I was about 12 years old and loved every minute of it. Great, fast paced read. The storyline reads like a really great slasher movie. Good fun. Enjoy

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the shadow crossed her direct line of vision Priscilla grew faint and begin to spin. A kaleidoscope of blinding, multicolored lights flashed before her eyes. Blood rushed through her body and pounded like drumbeats in her head. Then she opened her eyes with animal cunning, tensing the muscles of her arms and legs, and sprang to life. She would not die helplessly. She would die fighting for her life.

Published in 1983 this book is classic slasher movie in written form. To me, it's everything that Richard Laymon aimed for, but a lot more fun than many of his books. It takes a "hit-it-and-quit-it" approach to its story without any hifalutin nonsense and trickery that can mess up a lot of horror novels. Not that I always mind that sort of thing, but sometimes you just want the good stuff without wading through 5oo pages of dense prose to get it. It's too bad that it's been long out of print and has become such a difficult book to find. I can't believe that I missed it for these past few decades haunting the horror sections of used bookstores. A horror fan has to wade through a lot of crap to uncover a gem but that's the deal you have to accept. I'm hoping that some publisher out there gets the rights to get it reprinted and make it available again. And no, they don't do covers like that anymore. You can read it while playing your old Pyromania record if you're inclined to.

[Georgette Kaplan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is actually badass. It's basically a slasher movie in prose form. A bunch of teenagers encompassing all the high school stereotypes (jock, cheerleader, nerd... uh, Hispanic) break into a cemetery to smoke, drink, and fool around. But *this* cemetery has a caretaker who was disfigured in a prank gone wrong back when *he* was a teenager and he thinks that one of the girls is his old crush and the others are his tormentors.

Like I said, this is trying to be a horror movie, but back in the Eighties, when horror movies were horror movies instead of TED Talks with jumpscares. There's no social commentary, barely any character development, virtually zero scenes taking place before the killing starts. Just some flashbacks to when the killer (dubbed Cleats in the present day, which is the kind of thing that needs to be workshopped before someone actually makes a movie out of this) was a boy.

Unusually, his maiming really does come across as an accident--I mean, these things are always accidents, but this time it really seems like a coincidence, just him falling down as a cherry bomb went off, not the usual depraved indifference that makes you kinda root for a guy to kill some sluts.

But then, that's probably owing to the book's winning brevity. There's no scenes where he gets his hands on 'the real bad guys,' no scenes where the teenagers ramble around and get scared by cats, and pretty much nothing after the climax. It is serial killing all the way down. You have to appreciate that in a time when the next Friday the 13th "movie" is going to be a ten-episode streaming series about Pamela Voorhees' origin. On Peacock.

[Phrique · Rating 5 out of 5]

🪦🪦🪦🪦🪦/5

I finally got to read Joyride by Stephen Crye, a #vintagehorror gem and I can see why. Drunk Uncle Crye spun a crazy slasher story for us, all told in a surprisingly tight compact format that all takes place in one lone night in a cemetery. 9 youths go for a JOYRIDE in the ol’ cemetery after graduation, something that everyone does, right? 9 youths that span all the high school tropes we know and love. Complete with the “studious & shy girl who can’t see without her glasses” and the “hefty young man who brought a bag of chips to munch on while everyone else was having premarital sex.”

Yes, it was THAT premise & it was pretty damn great. Cleats, the former groundskeeper is disturbed from his mental festering, triggered by the flashbacks of the explosive memories he has from high school when he was horribly disfigured. Time for payback, one lustful coed at a time. It’s everything you think it is and then some. Told exactly like the greats are. It’s hard to find, but it’s worth it if you can get your hands on it! Big recommendation, especially if you like them old, bloody, and trashy.

[DJMikeG · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the taste free cover art, nice big, silver embossed title and a back cover blurb exclaiming "MORE HORRIFYING THAN HALLOWEEN MORE GRISLY THAN FRIDAY THE 13TH", you have a pretty good idea what you are getting into. This is an early 80s slasher film in book form. Not a top tier one, like Halloween or Friday the 13th, either, more like "The Prowler" or "The Burning", or one of the other seemingly endless slasher gore fests that haunted the multiplexes and video store shelves of the 1980s. There really is nothing more to it than a hulking brute named Cleats stalking and murdering a group of partying teenagers in a graveyard. The book does get points for giving us Cleats' background during some haunting, disturbing and ridiculous flashbacks. Written competently enough, this is not fine literature, nor does it aspire to be. It is an early 80s slasher film in book form, nothing more, nothing less. If that sounds like something you'd like, you will probably get some enjoyment out of it.

[Zeke · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a horror fan — especially Golden Age Slashers — Joyride was a gem of a find. Set in 1982 and released in 1983, it feels like a lost cult classic aching to be rediscovered. As a fun read, this body count story is stacked with gnarly kills committed by a memorable villain with a humanizing backstory. Even the nine teenage victims (while still stereotypes) had enough personality to stand apart from each other; I was also surprised by who the first victim was, and who ended up surviving. If you dig straight-forward old school slashers like My Bloody Valentine, The Burning, or The Prowler (all 1981) you should seek out a copy of Stephen Crye’s Joyride — it’s a blast from an era when the genre reigned supreme, and a shame its borrowing content never made it to the big screen.

But as the whole story is pretty much set in a vast graveyard and not in moving vehicles on the open road, I never understood the title’s significance. Anyone who has read this care to elaborate?

[Amina Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

“More horrifying than Halloween”
“More grisly than Friday The 13th”

The perfect novel for horror fans! If you love slashers then be sure to check out this hidden gem!

9 friends are trapped in a cemetery at night and are being chased down one by one by a psychotic killer!

This is Halloween, Friday The 13th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre in book form. Another great cinematic experience.