Summer fiction: Five edge-of-your-beach-chair reads

Joyland

by Stephen King (Titan, $13)

Stephen King has become “something of a literary sleight-of-hand master,” said Tom Nolan in The Wall Street Journal. Many of his recent books belie the contents promised by their covers, often by going deeper than readers expect. His latest, for instance, “presents itself as a hair-raising thriller (which indeed it is),” but its story of a young man caught up in a murder mystery at a carnival show is also “a bittersweet romance,” a tribute to 1970s summers, and “a celebration of the wonder of existence.” The tale never skimps on supernatural excitement, said Bill Sheehan in The Washington Post. After a woman’s ghost is spotted at the fairgrounds, the narrator is drawn deep into the mystery behind a series of carnival killings. Yet “the real strength” of the book isn’t the whodunit but King’s ability to create an emotional bond between readers and his characters. “King has been writing stories that matter for nearly 40 years. In Joyland, he has done it once again.”

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The Shining Girls

by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland, $26)

Lauren Beukes’s third novel is “a strong contender for the role of this summer’s universal beach read,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. A book that “would resemble a standard serial-killer story had Beukes not loaded it with acrobatic twists,” The Shining Girls features a murderer with a terrifying talent: When he kills, he can time-travel back to the 1930s to hide. But finally, in 1989, he leaves a girl named Kirby grievously wounded but not dead, and she takes up his trail when she grows up to be a newspaper intern. “Depending on a reader’s taste, all of this may sound either absurd or irresistible,” said Charles Finch in USA Today. Beukes never convincingly explains the mechanics of the killer’s time travel, and the magic of the story “comes apart at the seams” when he and Kirby engage in a decade-hopping final confrontation. “But readers will forgive talent almost anything, and Beukes has it.” The Shining Girls “marks her arrival as a major writer of popular fiction.”

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

by Karen Joy Fowler (Marian Wood/Putnam, $27)

“This brave, bold, shattering novel reminds us what it means to be human, in the best and worst sense,” said Connie Ogle in The Miami Herald. Karen Joy Fowler, who’s known for the breezy 2004 best seller The Jane Austen Book Club, has this time created “a different sort of beast.” Rosemary Cooke, a 22-year-old student, is looking back on her upbringing to explain how her once-happy Midwestern family was torn apart. “Some startling facts emerge” before the story’s crucial reveal, said Michael Upchurch in The Seattle Times. Rosemary’s sister disappeared when Rosemary was 5, and her brother later went AWOL as a radical animal-rights activist. Fowler uses the mysteries of those events to explore weighty questions about the ways humans and animals differ, but the “big, warm, loudly beating heart” of the novel is in “its gradually pieced-together tale of family togetherness, disruption, and reconciliation.”

The Son

by Philipp Meyer (Ecco, $28)

“The Son likely will catapult Philipp Meyer into the first rank of contemporary American novelists,” said Matt Bondurant in the San Francisco Chronicle. A multi-generational saga about a single Texas family, Meyer’s beefy follow-up to 2009’s acclaimed American Rust turns out to be “one of the most powerful, sweeping epics ever set in the Lone Star State.” Readers first hear the voice of Eli McCullough, a son of 1830s settlers who is raised as a Comanche warrior before he leaves that fading life and creates a cattle and oil empire. “No wonder,” then, that his son Peter, the book’s next protagonist, “feels small by comparison,” said Mike Fischer in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A “weak, overly sensitive” diarist, Peter provides a forgettable bridge to Eli’s great-granddaughter Jeannie, an heiress who displays more of her towering forebear’s gumption. Yet even with its relatively slack middle, Meyer’s novel is “simply a great read.” For all the debts it owes to other fictional Texas sagas, it’s also “a true American original.”

Bad Monkey

by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf, $27)

Every Carl Hiaasen novel contains a few essential ingredients, said Oline H. Cogdill in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Start with “broad humor that capitalizes on Florida’s quirkiness,” add an environmental concern or two, stir in “social commentary that might rival Jonathan Swift,” and presto! His latest concerns a Miami cop who’s been demoted to restaurant inspection when his sleuthing instincts are reawakened by a disembodied arm that’s been pulled in on a tourist’s fishing line. Our detective proves to be “enough of a charismatic goof to maintain interest,” but narrative distractions abound, said Robert Epstein in The Independent (U.K.). A vignette about a decapitated country singer feels totally unnecessary—“as if Hiaasen had too many ideas for humorous deaths” and couldn’t resist the detour. And when the action shifts to the Bahamas, the author unwisely renders all dialogue in a patois that is “close to unreadable.” Fortunately, Hiaasen has also rediscovered “some of the delirious ingenuity that previously distinguished his work.” Bad Monkey may not have the “all-consuming exhilaration” of Hiaasen’s best stuff, but it reaffirms his standing as “the king of Florida noir.”