The right amount of both dreamy and dark ... The novel is lush, packed with jarring details, and surprisingly tender ... Although sex and porn drive the plot, Chiem chooses to leave the act itself offstage; this puts the novel’s focus where it belongs and intensifies the characters’ connections. In King of Joy, everyone is either an actor or a voyeur, including the reader. Chiem’s command of perspective is excellent, and each sensory detail feels like a nail on the skin ... The novel is enticingly bitter at times, juxtaposing sharp images against pastel-sentimental landscapes ... The balance of acid and sweet is King of Joy‘s strength ... delicious, demonic novel that fades through adjacent, looping worlds in the magical early 2000s. Chiem evokes a lost decade and suggests the shape of the monsters that churned beneath its surface.
Dreamy, beautifully written, hippo-inflected, grief-soaked ... [Chiem's] meditative sentences pull you close, and then, right when he has you where he wants you, he shows you some weird thing that makes you laugh, tear up a little, or remember that even your tiniest insights and observations are valuable to the world ... shows off Chiem's knack for writing about trauma while avoiding cliche.
... pulpy noir, part Tarantino, part Thelma and Louise, featuring pornographers, pretentious playwrights, a pit bull named Marco, and a pod of homicidal hippopotami ... a novel about grief, told in a dream-like haze that mostly, but not entirely, avoids any mention of time and place ... a lovely, multi-faceted character study ... While it’s questionable whether Chiem’s finely drawn portrayal of heartache, loneliness, and isolation works alongside a hyper-real narrative about an insane, vengeful pornographer, I did find it entertaining. The climax happens in a rush, almost as if Chiem had somewhere else to be, and yet the abrupt ending doesn’t undermine what turns out to be a surprisingly poignant novel about the devastating nature of grief, but also the importance of love and friendship.
King of Joy possesses a funereal tone, shifting through events in a nonlinear fashion that suggests a consciousness in Corvus attempting to reckon with the trauma of her past. There’s a dream-like quality to the situations Chiem invents, and animals in the book are often attributed more admirable human qualities than the humans ... he novel tends to take on the same languid energy as the lives it depicts. In that sense, Chiem was likely wise not to extend the story past two hundred pages. But there is something refreshingly ordinary about the author’s milieu. His characters are disaffected urbanites, not academics or precocious wunderkind.
King of Joy is all the boring part of porn—the bad acting before the fucking ... Chiem excellently chronicles the sort of flirty conversation people have when they're too hungover to say anything worthwhile, but feeling just well enough to fuck ... Yet there isn't any fucking in the book. It's all blonde ladies named Amber saying things like 'I like your collarbone,' and then the story artfully cuts away ... There are some memorable moments ... Chiem's prose flows forth like a broken faucet. I imagine some editor in the background frantically searching for the emergency water shutoff. Chiem ignores most punctuation, but he's allowed to skirt the rules because it works. It's too bad about the plot ... Ultimately, King of Joy is aimed at the heart of a very specific 1990s-era sensibility ... There are romantic descriptions of raves, and causal asides about Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes. I'm probably a little too young for King of Joy, and a little too sober. I've been to drug parties where people on the floor pawed at the person setting up lines, but I like to be realistic about it. Inside a drug haze, everything feels warm, genius, and epic, but we've all looked at our notes the next day and realized the genius thoughts we had while high are usually nothing special.
A proper novel...albeit one that uses shifts in time, hallucinatory wordplay, and a deeply wounded protagonist to strange effect ... Chiem can’t stick the landing—his denouement is abrupt, incongruous, and garish—but it’s still a remarkable portrayal of restless youth, made sweeter by the author’s crisp, spare prose and a thoughtful portrayal of a woman who lost her way ... Just another sad chapter in life’s rich tragedy.
