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The world of fantasy and horror is no stranger to Stephen King who has published at least one book nearly every year since 1974. Once a year I wait in nervous anticipation for his next release and every single time I am both surprised by how much I enjoyed his latest book and relieved that my expectations have been lived up to.
From Jake Chambers in The Gunslinger to Jack Sawyer in The Talisman, we now have 17-year-old Charlie Reade as the hero of Fairy Tale. As a young child, Charlie loses his mother to a terrible accident and nearly loses his father to drinking. His father makes his way out of alcoholism through what Charlie thinks was an answer to his desperate prayer and so vows to repay the miracle. His search ends when he saves the life of Howard Bowditch, his recluse of a neighbour, and goes on to look after him and his ageing German Shepherd, Radar. Although Howard and Radar have the reputation of being a fearsome, misanthropic pair, Charlie inserts himself into their lives to quickly become a constant fixture at Howard’s crumbling house — a house that Charlie later discovers sits at the entrance to a magical kingdom called Empis.
When Charlie eventually makes his way into Empis to save a dying Radar, he finds it to be a dreary place where the royal family was overthrown by the frightful usurper, Flight Killer, who inflicted a terrible curse upon all the people making their faces grey, disfigured, and blurring out of existence. Thus begins Charlie’s coming-of-age story from a young boy who started out as helping an old neighbour in need to a long-awaited champion of a kingdom out of this world.
Complex characters
King wrote this book in the thick of the pandemic when he asked himself what he could write that would make him happy. The answer came: “As if my imagination had been waiting for the question to be asked, I saw a vast deserted city — deserted but alive. I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, and a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street. I saw smashed statues (of what I didn’t know, but I eventually found out). I saw a huge, sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds. Those images released the story I wanted to tell.”
Fairy Tale is a good book for several reasons. King creates Charlie Reade as a complex, richly drawn character. He is haunted by his mother’s death and father’s alcoholism yet filled with hope and goodness. King has made it close to impossible to not be on his side. His arduous journey into Empis begins out of love for a dog that was never his to begin with but one that he loves as his own! King spends many chapters devoted to Charlie’s growing relationship with the irritable Howard Bowditch, laying the basis of Charlie’s fundamental goodness. The fantasy comes as a slow burn that lures you in, and just as you’re getting comfortable with the characters, suddenly douses you in its atmospherics.
Fairy Tale pays tribute to famous fairy tales and books including Jack and the Beanstalk, Rumpelstiltskin, The Call of Cthulhu, The Wizard of Oz and King’s own novels. In a way, it reads like a fairy tale about fairy tales. King has taken childhood stories and added his own light and dark magic to create a world that is mature enough for an adult to enjoy but still filled with the elements of a fairy tale. The result is a story that’s impossible to dislike.
Fairy tales have been told for centuries by countless writers and in myriad ways. Stephen King gives his own spin to the genre, adds his trademark horror, and creates a story that’s whimsical, spirited, a little scary, but mostly just one that took me back to my days of reading tales of brave princes and princesses fighting an evil force.
“When he spoke, it was again hard to believe that I hadn’t stepped into a storybook and become one of the characters”. Charlie’s incredulous wonder mirrored my own as I read this book. Stephen King has taken the everyday fairy tale and made something remarkable out of it. That said, King sets the bar for himself quite high and Fairy Tale doesn’t make it to my top three books by the man and that’s only because of the aforementioned bar. It truly feels like there’s nothing the king of horror can’t do. From the action-packed, spy thriller Billy Summers of last year to Fairy Tale this year, both light-in-the-dark stories, he has provided us with great places to escape to.