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Adventureland
Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso
608 pages, Paperback
First published July 19, 1990
4 people are currently reading
321 people want to read
About the author
Steve Harris
11 books16 followersLibrarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Steve Harris is a retired English novelist who was known for his work in the horror genre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_H...
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Steve Harris is a retired English novelist who was known for his work in the horror genre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_H...
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 5, 2024
Cover of the 1993 Tor mass-market, with different title. The one pictured up top is actually the 1991 Headline mass-market.
July 27, 2011
An awesome book which was published in the US as "The Eyes of The Beast" by TOR books. I own the UK hardcover and the US paperback edition, it is that good! This book has everything in it. Horror, some Sci-Fi , Fantasy , Romance, and evil creatures and villains. If you enjoy stories that have creepy carnivals in them, seek out this book! I'm pretty sure its been out of print for years now.
March 11, 2025
Nice slice of cosmic horror by Harris, who went on to write several other horror novels in the 90s. His works are a bit hard to find in the States, but worth the effort to track them down. As usual for Harris, a broad cast of characters fill the over 600 pages of text. Our main protagonist, a just-turned 19 Dave Carter, still lives at home and has a wonderful girlfriend named Sally. As a birthday gift, she gives him many things, but one stands out-- an ancient silver cross with an eye on it, and a matching smaller cross that fits in the back of it. The significance of the crosses becomes more apparent as the tale winds on.
As the title suggests, the focus of the book revolves around a funfair known as AdventureLand. One side plot has the Cousins family (mom, dad and 9 y.o. 'Tiger') attending the fair and Tiger just seems to disappear when his mom is playing a game. Eventually, the get the cops involved, search the place and surrounds, but no Tiger. The next week the fair arrives in Dave and Sally's town. Dave and Sally, along with another couple, attend the fair and eventually go on the Ghost Train, a macabre journey. The ride seems to take a very long time and the little car they are in seems to go up and down quite a ways-- impossible! They see all kinds of odd things, like an evil worm that drips saliva on them, and when they finally reach the end, the car with their pals on it gets attacked by a skeleton and appears to kill them (with the strobe lights it is hard to tell). Well, they exit the ride and then the empty car that held their friends exits. WTF? Dave goes a little crazy, but eventually the proprietor gives him the boot. Did they just imagine this? Things start to go even more crazy...
Kudos to Harris for bringing such imagination here! I do not want to go much into the plot (and the many subplots!) but Adventureland brings to mind classic cosmic horror novels like King's It. For whatever arcane reason, it seems Dave and Sally have been tasked to stop the encroachment of 'the bad side' into the world, and the 'bad side' has allies at Adventureland for sure, mainly the owner of the Ghost Train and his sons/pals. I enjoyed the pacing, and even though this sprawling epic has many characters and subplots, Harris weaves them together seamlessly. The pacing helped here as well. Finally, I thought the ending a bit abrupt, but so be it. 4 evil stars!
As the title suggests, the focus of the book revolves around a funfair known as AdventureLand. One side plot has the Cousins family (mom, dad and 9 y.o. 'Tiger') attending the fair and Tiger just seems to disappear when his mom is playing a game. Eventually, the get the cops involved, search the place and surrounds, but no Tiger. The next week the fair arrives in Dave and Sally's town. Dave and Sally, along with another couple, attend the fair and eventually go on the Ghost Train, a macabre journey. The ride seems to take a very long time and the little car they are in seems to go up and down quite a ways-- impossible! They see all kinds of odd things, like an evil worm that drips saliva on them, and when they finally reach the end, the car with their pals on it gets attacked by a skeleton and appears to kill them (with the strobe lights it is hard to tell). Well, they exit the ride and then the empty car that held their friends exits. WTF? Dave goes a little crazy, but eventually the proprietor gives him the boot. Did they just imagine this? Things start to go even more crazy...
Kudos to Harris for bringing such imagination here! I do not want to go much into the plot (and the many subplots!) but Adventureland brings to mind classic cosmic horror novels like King's It. For whatever arcane reason, it seems Dave and Sally have been tasked to stop the encroachment of 'the bad side' into the world, and the 'bad side' has allies at Adventureland for sure, mainly the owner of the Ghost Train and his sons/pals. I enjoyed the pacing, and even though this sprawling epic has many characters and subplots, Harris weaves them together seamlessly. The pacing helped here as well. Finally, I thought the ending a bit abrupt, but so be it. 4 evil stars!
December 1, 2016
The Adventureland carnival is coming into town and a group of teenagers go there for a fun day out. Then inside the Ghost Train two of them are murdered in front of their friends-yet no trace of them or the crime exists and the carnival deny everything. Meanwhile others are disappearing including young children and it is clear that something truly evil is living in the carnival.
I LOVED this book! It reminded me in some ways of IT-the evil monster preying on kids and teenagers while the adults turn a blind eye, but don't be fooled into thinking that this is a cheap copy because it has very imaginative interlinking stories, good characters and the great battle over the evil monster which was imaginative and interesting. Loved it!
I LOVED this book! It reminded me in some ways of IT-the evil monster preying on kids and teenagers while the adults turn a blind eye, but don't be fooled into thinking that this is a cheap copy because it has very imaginative interlinking stories, good characters and the great battle over the evil monster which was imaginative and interesting. Loved it!
March 2, 2021
really enjoyable. I'm not sure why but I set this down for a while. I'm glad I went back to it. It gets weird as hell in the climax but it was a fun weird. I'm not sure what to say about it. Its kinda all over the place in stuff going on, it keeps changing things up and doesn't get old. There's classic good and evil, monsters, kidnapping, serial killer, magic, heaven & hell, asshole bullies, mystery, a giant that eats ppl, it rains those weird rubber frogs in carnival games. It's weird in the best way. I don't know where to start so much freaking happens!! definitely a keeper for me!
July 22, 2021
Solid 3. Enjoyable read, story flowed decently. At times seemed to be a bit too much going on and didn't help the story along. A bit winded is maybe the best way to say it. Still a good story though, but at 600+ pages and small font could have been slimmed down. It boils down to a book of good vs evil, but not a lot really explained that might have helped. Loved the english side of things though, fun phrases and expresions.
April 14, 2016
This was one of the first books I ever read, from cover to cover.
I never expected it to be so intriguing or exciting.
I thoroughly enjoyed the authors writing and description of characters/places.
A truly amazing book.
I never expected it to be so intriguing or exciting.
I thoroughly enjoyed the authors writing and description of characters/places.
A truly amazing book.
January 22, 2024
Review to come.
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March 8, 2021As ive said previously - Funfairs/Carnivals - perfect for horror books. Ghost trains, Clown faces. How can you go wrong...
Well... Ill be honest, i have NO idea how to review this book.
Near 600 pages that should have been 350 maximum.
The book started off great with people disappearing in the ghost train. Spooky stuff....
Then the book nosedived and became so painfully slow that on at least 3 occasions I nearly DNF'd even though I was over halfway through. It has taken me over a fortnight to get through whereas I average 2 nights a book.
What started as an old school horror then started throwing every horror trope you could ever think of into the mix...
A Giant? Check!
A troll? Check!
Zombies? Check!
Posession of Bodies? Check!
Hell? Check!
Eating Victims? Check!
The only thing I can think of that this book missed was Vampires.
It has to be said though the last 100 pages did pick up and it was a decent ending.
Well... Ill be honest, i have NO idea how to review this book.
Near 600 pages that should have been 350 maximum.
The book started off great with people disappearing in the ghost train. Spooky stuff....
Then the book nosedived and became so painfully slow that on at least 3 occasions I nearly DNF'd even though I was over halfway through. It has taken me over a fortnight to get through whereas I average 2 nights a book.
What started as an old school horror then started throwing every horror trope you could ever think of into the mix...
A Giant? Check!
A troll? Check!
Zombies? Check!
Posession of Bodies? Check!
Hell? Check!
Eating Victims? Check!
The only thing I can think of that this book missed was Vampires.
It has to be said though the last 100 pages did pick up and it was a decent ending.
March 25, 2012
3.5 stars
Two teens and their friends get caught up in mysterious goings-on at the Adventureland funfair and end up doing battle with the evil forces that dwell on the 'other side'. Put me in mind of a really hard-core Scooby-doo episode, but with a lot more gore and violence.
Also includes a particularly memorable scene for a mottephobe like me: if you're really not keen on moths, there's a couple of pages you might like to skim through ...
Two teens and their friends get caught up in mysterious goings-on at the Adventureland funfair and end up doing battle with the evil forces that dwell on the 'other side'. Put me in mind of a really hard-core Scooby-doo episode, but with a lot more gore and violence.
Also includes a particularly memorable scene for a mottephobe like me: if you're really not keen on moths, there's a couple of pages you might like to skim through ...
July 10, 2018
This is possibly my favorite horror / weird shit novel of all time.
My hardcover copy is seriously raggy and one page i have had to tape back in as I was reading and using the microwave at the same time and closed a page in the microwave door!
Always find something new each time i read it...a lot of it reminds me of my own teenage years.
Now my husband didn't care for it much but that's his loss.
My hardcover copy is seriously raggy and one page i have had to tape back in as I was reading and using the microwave at the same time and closed a page in the microwave door!
Always find something new each time i read it...a lot of it reminds me of my own teenage years.
Now my husband didn't care for it much but that's his loss.
January 1, 2023
Adventureland is a 1990 debut horror novel by British author Steve Harris (1954-2016) who would go on to publish 7 hefty novels during the decade. It starts as young Tommy Cousins goes missing without a trace at a funfair. He's never found, and eventually the fair continues on to the next town, real-life Basingstoke, where 19-year-old Dave Carter is hanging out with his girlfriend Sally and his mates while dodging Roddy the violent bully and his cronies.
Dave witnesses several strange and unsettling events, in retrospect heralding the arrival of the carnival in town. The group visits the AdventureLand funfair, where a ride on the Ghost Train becomes an impossibly long underground nightmare journey, at the end of which Dave's friends Phil and Judy go missing. Dave and Sal go full Scooby Doo on the fair, discovering there's far more to the funfair than just the mystery of a few missing persons.
Adventureland is a nineties' novel, and as was popular in the wake of Clive Barker it begins as horror but takes a hard turn to dark fantasy. While the first half is firmly rooted in realism — it's set in Harris' home town of Basingstoke, and all the mentioned street names and car parks are accurate, I checked — the second half takes a deep dive into imaginative otherworlds with their own strange laws of nature, the Ghost Train being an entry point into these secret dimensions. The big bad is trying to upend the delicate balance that holds the other worlds and our real world in a delicate balance. It's all a bit cosmic, with Dave and Sal receiving magical crucifixes and other assistance from mysterious folks who want to keep things steady.
As an idea it's a hard sell, but Harris pulls through, going for broke with his ideas no matter how loony they might seem. There's a lot to digest here, from hellish landscapes to a shadowy limbo version of Basingstoke, a precursor to the Stranger Things' UpsideDown, if you will. But every strand is accounted for, somehow building up into a fun, fast and hugely imaginative narrative. It may be a case of a little too much of the good stuff in the last couple hundred pages, but for the most part Harris' own enduring enthusiasm for the material shines through. He's not slacking, every fight is visceral, with Dave barely escaping with his life numerous times, constantly taking more damage than seems humanly possible. The characters are far from heroes, often failing at their attempts, a scenario that repeats perhaps one or two times too many, although I assume it might be an essentially British trait for the characters. Dave and Sal are, however, very well written, with Dave as the reluctant hero and Sal as the sassy go-getter, somehow pulling themselves up by their bootstraps even in the most dire circumstances. The monsters, led by the ghastly impresario Fred Purdue are deliciously nasty. Eating the skin of a victim while keeping them alive? Or how about a giant grubby moth under the bed, anyone? The arch of one of the bullies, Roddy, is also noteworthy and deeply tragical, with Harris turning a one-dimensional bully into something fairly complex, with even a shot at redemption at the very end.
There are lovely references to 90s Britain, with Dave fiddling with his Amstrad CPC and the gang stopping for a kebab after the pub. Adventureland was published by Tor in the US with the alternate title The Eyes of the Beast. Presumably the supremely English setting and nature of the characters was a bit too alien for the folks on the other side of the Atlantic, but on this side it feels very familiar. Harris wrote what he knew, but didn't stop there, he just went for the crazy at full tilt. While more related to Barker than King, Harris doesn't exactly own a debt to any of the major authors, instead striking a fairly unique path all his own. Adventureland is a delightful and inventive novel, which perhaps came several years too late, with the horror boom already waning into oblivion in the course of the nineties. Harris was dropped by his publisher after Straker's Island in 1998, and apparently that spelled the end of his short but productive writing career. According to an interview there were a couple of completed novels after that (an extract from The Switch, deemed too violent, can be found on his website through the Wayback Machine), but nothing has yet appeared, nor are any of his published novels available in print or as ebooks. The sheer energy of Adventureland makes me want to read more Harris, with a feeble wish that others might some day be able to do so too.
Read all my reviews at mikareadshorrorfiction.wordpress.com
Dave witnesses several strange and unsettling events, in retrospect heralding the arrival of the carnival in town. The group visits the AdventureLand funfair, where a ride on the Ghost Train becomes an impossibly long underground nightmare journey, at the end of which Dave's friends Phil and Judy go missing. Dave and Sal go full Scooby Doo on the fair, discovering there's far more to the funfair than just the mystery of a few missing persons.
Adventureland is a nineties' novel, and as was popular in the wake of Clive Barker it begins as horror but takes a hard turn to dark fantasy. While the first half is firmly rooted in realism — it's set in Harris' home town of Basingstoke, and all the mentioned street names and car parks are accurate, I checked — the second half takes a deep dive into imaginative otherworlds with their own strange laws of nature, the Ghost Train being an entry point into these secret dimensions. The big bad is trying to upend the delicate balance that holds the other worlds and our real world in a delicate balance. It's all a bit cosmic, with Dave and Sal receiving magical crucifixes and other assistance from mysterious folks who want to keep things steady.
As an idea it's a hard sell, but Harris pulls through, going for broke with his ideas no matter how loony they might seem. There's a lot to digest here, from hellish landscapes to a shadowy limbo version of Basingstoke, a precursor to the Stranger Things' UpsideDown, if you will. But every strand is accounted for, somehow building up into a fun, fast and hugely imaginative narrative. It may be a case of a little too much of the good stuff in the last couple hundred pages, but for the most part Harris' own enduring enthusiasm for the material shines through. He's not slacking, every fight is visceral, with Dave barely escaping with his life numerous times, constantly taking more damage than seems humanly possible. The characters are far from heroes, often failing at their attempts, a scenario that repeats perhaps one or two times too many, although I assume it might be an essentially British trait for the characters. Dave and Sal are, however, very well written, with Dave as the reluctant hero and Sal as the sassy go-getter, somehow pulling themselves up by their bootstraps even in the most dire circumstances. The monsters, led by the ghastly impresario Fred Purdue are deliciously nasty. Eating the skin of a victim while keeping them alive? Or how about a giant grubby moth under the bed, anyone? The arch of one of the bullies, Roddy, is also noteworthy and deeply tragical, with Harris turning a one-dimensional bully into something fairly complex, with even a shot at redemption at the very end.
There are lovely references to 90s Britain, with Dave fiddling with his Amstrad CPC and the gang stopping for a kebab after the pub. Adventureland was published by Tor in the US with the alternate title The Eyes of the Beast. Presumably the supremely English setting and nature of the characters was a bit too alien for the folks on the other side of the Atlantic, but on this side it feels very familiar. Harris wrote what he knew, but didn't stop there, he just went for the crazy at full tilt. While more related to Barker than King, Harris doesn't exactly own a debt to any of the major authors, instead striking a fairly unique path all his own. Adventureland is a delightful and inventive novel, which perhaps came several years too late, with the horror boom already waning into oblivion in the course of the nineties. Harris was dropped by his publisher after Straker's Island in 1998, and apparently that spelled the end of his short but productive writing career. According to an interview there were a couple of completed novels after that (an extract from The Switch, deemed too violent, can be found on his website through the Wayback Machine), but nothing has yet appeared, nor are any of his published novels available in print or as ebooks. The sheer energy of Adventureland makes me want to read more Harris, with a feeble wish that others might some day be able to do so too.
Read all my reviews at mikareadshorrorfiction.wordpress.com
October 2, 2025
3.5⭐️
my first horror (I think?) this was so weird, I enjoyed it! One thing I really liked about this is the mention of normal English town things like the local m&s. I also really liked Dave and sally I thought Dave was refreshing to read as he was a normal scared guy (like everyone would be in his situation) and sally was really fun as she was very kickass!! A nice break from repetitive characters. if I was to add anything it would be a little bit at the end of them catching up or just being happy to tie it all together:)
my first horror (I think?) this was so weird, I enjoyed it! One thing I really liked about this is the mention of normal English town things like the local m&s. I also really liked Dave and sally I thought Dave was refreshing to read as he was a normal scared guy (like everyone would be in his situation) and sally was really fun as she was very kickass!! A nice break from repetitive characters. if I was to add anything it would be a little bit at the end of them catching up or just being happy to tie it all together:)
January 17, 2025
Bit of a struggle to finish tbh. Far too long and could really have done with another edit (the main character sneaks around the ghost train at night and gets beaten up - twice, on consecutive nights). Probably too many ideas crammed in, some of which add nothing to the plot. This was his first novel and things definitely improved in subsequent books.
July 16, 2018
Four n a half outta five.
Awesome book very fantastical and imaginative, looking greatly forward to reading all the other writings of Mr Harris.
Awesome book very fantastical and imaginative, looking greatly forward to reading all the other writings of Mr Harris.
February 18, 2022
This left an impression on me so much that I've been trying to track it down for years, trying to remember the name. Finally hit the right google search. Loved this book.
January 11, 2023
Brilliant! I thoroughly enjoyed this book. A mixture of mystery meets horror that keeps you guessing.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews