Throughout my life I have read quite a few Stephen King books. When I was a pre-teen was probably when I enjoyed them the most and I recall a lot of them really affecting me. Pet Semetary is probably the one that affected me the most and I remember having nightmares based on words that I read rather than images that I saw in a film so when that happens, I think you can successfully say that someone is a very talented writer.
In Fairy Tale King strays away from horror and instead goes towards exactly what the title of the book would suggest: Fantasy.
Nadi guards the book from would-be thieves anytime I am not around
This book starts out in modern times and follows teenager Charlie Reade in his day-to-day life of being a star athlete, a good student, as well as needing to be a lot more grown up than most teens should have to be due to his recovering alcoholic father and the fact that his mother died prematurely.
This is a major focus of the book and it is revisited constantly about how much of a problem alcoholism can be for a person and I think this is a good message and a very true one. Lord knows I have seen my fair share of problematic alcoholics in my expat years. That being the case though and the messaging is somewhat good here, I really don't like it when Stephen King attempts to me a moral compass for people, as has been doing for the past decade on Twitter and elsewhere. I was reading and wondering when King would try to use his very large stage to try to "educate" the masses and after the 27th time King imparts on us the dangers of deadly booze, I started to feel as though it wasn't really an essential part of the story so much as it was Mr. King trying to play the role of moral compass for the readers. Thankfully, this is basically the extent of his activism in the story.
Charlie is a good person. He looks out for others and is quite adept at doing the right thing in his life and that is why and how one day he ended up rescuing an older man who lives near his home in a spooky residence at the end of the road that all the kids have rumors and legends about who lives there and in particular how ferocious the dog is that guards the place.
I immediately conjured up the house from Edward Scissorhands although that is not what King was trying to do. The real presentation is just an old house in a state of disrepair and overgrowth of weeds and plants and an old man resident that nobody in the community knows anything about. Rumor has it that he is "old money" and the house has been passed down through generations.
One day Charlie is cycling home when he hears a cry for help and bravely jumps the fence to find an old man who has fallen off a ladder and is in grave need of help. Enter Mr. Howard Bowditch. The man of mystery that has so many rumors around him and also "Radar" the growling yet elderly dog that is not at all a threat.
There are some illustrations in the book that kind of give you an idea about Bowditch but the rumors about him are mostly true in that he is a hermit, wants people to stay off his lawn and leave him alone. However, in this particular situation he is doomed if someone hadn't jumped the fence to help him. It seems as though he doesn't actually want Charlie's help, but the bone protruding from his leg has other plans.
Thus begins a friendship between old cranky man and vibrant youth football star, which honestly was kind of hokey in my mind and this is where I started to feel as though Stephen King was kind of out of his wheelhouse when attempting to write this story. Even though I'm not exactly a teenager myself the ways in which Mr. King attempts to write the slang-riddled language of a modern-day teenager is really cringe and he gets it wrong very frequently. It made me think of the many people I have met in my life that are desperately trying to have something in common with the youth of today and Charlie's internal dialogue isn't the way that teenagers talk these days.
I suppose it really isn't that important but Since this book is an absolute monster at over 700 pages, the amount of time King spends trying to display the internal workings of a teenage boy eats up a ton of time just to be completely wrong about almost all of it. I would imagine that a teenager reading this would get a laugh out of it as Charlie says "awesome sauce" and "cool beans" multiple times throughout the story and I don't know if that was ever something the kids were saying, but it wasn't the case in 2022 when this book was released.
King writes long books, we all know this. But this was the first time in reading anything of his that I felt as though he was artificially inflating the length of the book and in many chapters, I found myself reading just the first and last sentence of every paragraph because there was so much flowery description of rather meaningless aspects of the story.
Now, this next bit is going to be a bit difficult to do without spoiling so i'll throw in another picture of my guard dog to lighten the mood.
She was starting to get upset with me for keeping her awake for such a silly photo shoot
For the first half of this book you are kind of waiting for the "fairy" stuff to actually happen, and this in my mind is the better half of the book because it is hinted at that there is something magical going on in the Bowditch estate but it isn't revealed to Charlie or to us until Mr. Bowditch becomes quite confident and comfortable with opening up to Charlie, who has volunteered to be Mr. Bowditch's caretaker for the summer and this later extends into the school year as well.
We get to fantasy-land stuff later as it is revealed that there is a portal of sorts on Bowditch's land and that is the 2nd half of the book and IMO, this is where the book kind of falls apart. It's not bad per se, it just isn't King's strong suit. I sort of felt as though Stephen is so famous now that he can publish a book about anything and the publishers are going to run with it likely without even reading it.
The fantasy world, well, I am not going to spoil this for you should you decide to read this. I am not going to advise that people don't read this because just like almost all of King's other works it is very easy to read. The chapters are short and the wording is kept to a "common man" sort of verbiage, so you aren't going to need to look words up very often.
I just don't think that this is King's best work but then again, with authors like him the bar is set so high because greatness is expected of him that probably wouldn't be expected of other authors.
I would say that just like a lot of King's other books this one could have been about half the length that it is and still have the same story in it. The ironic thing about this is that while a lot of things are really stretched out to what I consider to be "too long" the grand crescendo that 50% of the book has been leading up to ends in a mere 2 pages. It's strange but whatever man, it is what it is.
I managed to read this book in about a week because it is very easy to read. I will admit that a lot of the chapters were more so scanned than they were read because like I said, there is a ton of what I consider to be completely unnecessary descriptions in there and King's attempts to be in the mind of a modern 17-year old is pretty humorous because he is very off the mark as far as that is concerned. For example: He references Charlie talking about Turner Classic Movies (TCM) at least 25 times in the book and I don't think that this particular network has any more than perhaps half a dozen teenagers as regular viewers. He likely did this because it is the sort of shows and films that King himself would be most familiar with.
I went into this book kind of excited that King was taking on Fantasy and I at times felt like the Kid in the Neverending story because of the huge nature of the tome I had with me.
Final Answer!
I would borrow this book from the library if you have one nearby. Honestly, I am so jealous of Americans and the fact that they can get basically anything ever written for free. I would not purchase this book though, it isn't good enough to have on your shelf and encourage others to borrow it and read it themselves...
On a scale of "pissed off Nadi" to "Absolutely gobsmacked Nadi" I give Fairy Tale a rating of "staring at food she mostly wouldn't eat if it was given to her Nadi"
for those that don't understand my Nadi-scale, this would be roughly a 5 or 6 / 10
