Fairy Tale by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When I hit a reading slump, as happened when my long commute went away at the start of the pandemic, I often struggle to find a book to get started on. On the one hand, I enjoy giving unknown authors a chance, but this often leads to, if not disappointment, then an underwhelming experience where a book is perfectly decent, but feels like eating a bland meal. It does the job, but nothing more.
In this case, I decided to turn to the author I’ve read more than any other (hardly a novel claim, if you’ll pardon the pun), and tackled Stephen King’s latest, the generically-titled Fairy Tale.
There will be spoilers below. A spoiler-free summation would be: Buy it if you’re a King fan, if you’re not super hardcore about how fantasy worlds should “work”, or if you are a sucker for alternate dimensions/realities–like I am.
The story is divided into two parts. The first third establishes the relationship between Charlie Reade, an athletic 17-year-old high school student, and a reclusive old man named Bowditch, who lives in what is termed a “Psycho house” at the top of a hill on the street where Charlie lives. Charlie hears Bowditch’s cries for help after he has fallen off a ladder while trying to clean the gutters of his house, breaking his leg. Charlie becomes something of a local hero and he and Bowditch form a friendship during Bowditch’s recovery.
After revealing that he has not much time to live, Bowditch tells Charlie about a secret in the locked shed in his backyard, where Charlie had previously heard a strange skittering sound. Describing it as a burden rather than a blessing, Bowditch leaves Charlie his estate, along with some hurried instructions on tape regarding the shed, recorded as Bowditch suffers a fatal heart attack.
Charlie unlocks the shed and enters a tunnel that leads deep down into the earth and eventually emerges into another world with two moons, called Empis.
From here, the story takes on the fairy tale of the name, where the people of Empis, suffer under a curse by a possibly-not-quite-human-anymore king named Elden. The people see Charlie as their saviour prince, which, of course, turns out to be true.
Empis is one of these strange worlds that King likes to write about, mixing high fantasy tropes with anachronistic modern touches, like electric trolleys. King deliberately avoids trying to explain everything. Indeed, Charlie, who narrates the tale, notes this himself, surmising his time in Empis as one with many mysteries left unsolved.
Some might be impatient with the slow burn approach of the story, which spends hundreds of pages in the small town of Sentry’s Rest before moving on to Empis, but in this opening third of the novel King effortlessly makes the mundane not just interesting, but compelling, peppering the story with hints of weirder things to come.
In Empis, the story becomes a retelling of sorts of Rumpelstiltskin, filtered through King’s version of a magical, high fantasy realm where magic exists, both good and dark. There are noble sacrifices, dungeon escapes, gladiatorial games, dubious astronomy, truly evil villains and through it all, King adroitly drops in the kinds of details that make the place and its people feel authentic.
There are also more spiralling staircases in this story than in any other I’ve ever read. If you have an unnatural fear of spiral staircases, be warned!
Overall, I enjoyed Fairy Tale. It may seem trite by now to call any King novel “vintage King” but it fits here. King clearly had a lot of fun creating the world and people of Empis, and fusing it, Dark Tower-style, to our modern one. It even has a happy ending.
Recommended.
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