Fairy Tale
Author Stephen King
Illustrators Gabriel Rodríguez & Nicolas Delort
Publisher Scribner
Publication date September 6, 2022
At one point or another, a lot of fiction writers, usually already in a particular genre, decide to take a crack at writing a story in Fairyland. The results, at best, are mixed. The last such effort I read was so bad I actually cringed reading it, and the author later ruefully admitted that a lot of people saw it as a career ender.
King has sometimes referenced fairy tale elements; Needful Things ends on a click-your-heels-three-times-and-think-of-Kansas note, and such elements populate his Dark Tower series, It, and other books. I can’t say they improved any of the stories, so, coupled with my most recent experience, I opened this book with considerable trepidation. It didn’t help that I had just happened to stumble across a webcomic by Skottie Young called “I Hate Fairyland,” a raucous and hilarious parody of the genre. The seven-year-old protagonist, Gertrude, utterly fails, after being stuck in Fairyland for thirty years, in looking like a sweet young girl, which is just as well since she has become a homicidal maniac. She makes Ashley Cope’s Sette Frummagem look like a choir girl. Gertrude gets away with a lot of stuff because physically she hasn’t aged. You would think the bloodstains and double-bladed battle ax would be a warning sign, right?
So: King, spinner of a fairy tale. Grimm and Grimmer. Coal Black and the Seven Sins?
The master of the ‘gotcha’ starts out unusually slowly in this novel. So much so that about a quarter of the way in, I set it aside and read a different novel, and resumed reading it only when I noticed it was still in my tablet’s active queue. Often with King novels, I read them if I don’t have anything important on the next day, since I might end up reading it all night.
As it happened, I broke off just at the point where King starts picking up the pace. The protagonist/viewpoint character is Charlie Reade, who is a 17 year-old galoot. He’s a choir boy letterman who shies away from impure thoughts about women and is convulsed with guilt over pulling the fire alarm at school when he was ten years old. He’s seven years old when Mommy gets pasted by a truck on a nearby bridge, Daddy turns into a drunk, and he spends four or five years taking care of Daddy before Pops finally grabs himself by the scruff and hauls off to AA, where he twelve-steps away from the brink. King puts enormous time and effort into establishing characters here, which is unexpected, as he is sort of the Albert Hirschfeld of characterization; a few extraordinarily deft strokes, and he has created a recognizable person with inner strengths and weakness revealed. Mind you, King is good at this, among the best, but in this instance, the characters aren’t that interesting. The only one I would have liked to know more about was the 13 year old goth classmate of a younger Charlie who introduced him to HP Lovecraft. But the galoot helps Daddy, saves an old man, falls in love with a dog, sees the old man die and the dog get ruinously old, and then falls down a rabbit hole seeking a fountain of youth for the dog. That’s when it gets interesting.
The galoot, it turns out, wasn’t one of King’s least inspired protagonists; he’s the hero in a fairy tale. No, not a spoiler—it’s right there in the goddam title. But galoot is destined to become Prince Charles (no relation), wannabee savior of old dogs and new gods and all of Fairyland.
King’s Fairyland is, as you might imagine, darker and grittier than your standard Tinkerbelle story. There is a monstrous fat 15-foot tall woman who eats children, and a Lovecraftian evil deep underground whose surprisingly biblical name may not be uttered. A plague has turned most of the people into grey misshapen wraiths, most of the butterflies are dead, and the capital city is run by evil grotesqueries who arrange Squid-Game type tournaments for fun and recreation. Charlie quickly learns that a fairyland dungeon isn’t much like high school life in Smallville.
It IS a fairy tale, so the ending won’t strike anyone as being particularly astonishing, but under King’s craftsmanship, the reader has a fair bit of fun (and the requisite number of shudders) getting there.
Not his strongest effort, but at least it didn’t make me cringe. And like most of King’s works, at least worth the read.