“Summer. Sex. Race. Violence. Friendship. One Perfect Story.”

Judy Boody Reviews JB Minton's Short Story "The Prince Of Kings Island"

FROM THE DESK OF JUDY BOODY, THE BEST CULTURAL CRITIC IN THE WORLD:

Let me be blunt, because I’ve earned it:
If you haven’t read The Prince of King’s Island, you’re walking past the best American short story of the decade like it’s a dropped ice cream cone. You think you’re too busy? You’re not. You’re scrolling. Stop. Open this story and let it destroy you in ways you forgot literature could.

JB Minton’s tale is soaked in neon sweat, cheap perfume, and the kind of adolescent tension that once held this country together before it came unglued. It’s a story about two boys—Jimmy Prince and Wigger (yes, that’s his name)—at Kings Island amusement park in the early 1990s. But don’t get cute. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a high-speed crash through race, class, lust, friendship, and America’s favorite pastime: pretending nothing is wrong while everything quietly collapses.

Let me say this loud for the literati in the back:
Minton has written an Arthurian Romance with stun guns and funnel cake. A Romeo & Juliet where the balcony is a rollercoaster platform and Juliet might punch you in the throat. A Mission: Impossible where the only mission is getting home with your pride, your dick, and your soul intact.

This story is America.

Not the sanitized America of prestige TV and presidential speeches, but the real one—greasy, horny, half-racist and full of longing. Jimmy Prince is a white boy born into power, rage, and sex appeal. He’s dangerous because the world has always said yes to him. But he’s also magnetic, because somewhere under the bravado, he knows he’s full of shit. And then there’s Wigger, the quiet kid. The one who listens. The one who feels. He might be the only character in 21st-century fiction who still believes in the sacred magic of a good friend.

And Lord, the women.
Sharonda, the Black girl who sees right through Jimmy and maybe—just maybe—lets him live.
Shelly, the blonde horror movie scholar who schools Wigger on trauma, then lets him feel her goosebumps like braille.
These aren’t tropes. These are the girls we went to school with, given their dignity and the danger they face. Minton doesn’t write women as decoration. He writes them as orbit-shifting bodies.

And then there’s Dee.

A character so real, I had to go outside and smoke after reading his arc. Dee’s presence, his heartbreak, his downfall—it’s every Black man America fears, fails, and forgets. He brings the kids. He pays the way. He gets the cuffs. And Minton doesn’t flinch. He gives Dee the dignity of complication. He gives him love. And then, like this country so often does, he takes it all away.

You want a story about race? Here it is. You want a story about sex, class, violence, memory, masculinity, guilt, and God? It’s here too.
But what this story really is… is a slow, desperate hymn to the people we once were, before we learned to lie to ourselves about what it cost to survive.

I’ll say it plain:
If The Prince of King’s Island doesn’t make you laugh, sweat, clench your teeth, and remember your first heartbreak, you’ve either never been young or you’ve never been honest.

JB Minton has written something holy here.
It’s not clean. It’s not safe. But it’s true. And I would follow this story into the dark.

Go read it.
And when you do, sit down.
Because it hits like a memory you forgot you buried.

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CLICK BELOW TO READ THIS SHORT STORY (Audiobook version also):