M. Weald

If I’d been asked to pick my favorite author during high school, it probably would have been Stephen King. I read my fair share of his horror classics during this time: The Stand, The Shining, It, The Long Walk, Cell, Under the Dome, etc. I grew up amongst the corn fields of southern Indiana and something about this devil-at-the-crossroads Midwest pastiche demanded some flavor of emo out of pretty much everyone. For many that meant a long fringy black haircut, black clothes, black nail polish, skinny jeans, and a general air of existential fatalism. For my nerdy self, it meant reading Stephen King’s very specific style of the small town macabre well into the night … and long fringy brown hair, skinny jeans, and a penchant to listen to My Chemical Romance. All that aside, my favorite out of his many works has to be his era spanning fantasy epic: The Dark Tower Series. On those occasions when he dipped into the world of fantasy, his descriptions of the grim and gory melded with my earliest literary love of heroic fantasy to become something new to my young high school self. At the time, it felt like only those who truly liked Stephen King even knew of his Dark Tower novels, his magnum opus hidden behind his much better known aforementioned horror hits. I recall after finishing book 7 and closing the door on the story of gunslinger Roland Deschain, I searched through his bibliography hoping for more of the same. I found his book The Eye of the Dragon and read that right away. Soon after that the The Wind Through The Keyhole was published. Still, none of it’s ever quite fully scratched the itch. My reading habits are more varied, at least in terms of authors, these days, but I still keep an eye out for any new Stephen King release. Especially one of the fantasy variety. So, you can imagine my excitement when I heard tell of Fairy Tale.

With a name like Fairy Tale, I would have been sorely disappointed had it not included a fantastical, medieval adjacent realm filled with unknown magics needing to be set aright. Thankfully, the book well and truly followed through on the name’s promise. It is even told with the air of one sitting at a campfire, relaying an adventure of their past. In this case, the narrator is an older Charlie Reade, relaying his difficult childhood and subsequent journey to another realm. At this point, I’ll give a minor spoiler warning. Nothing major, just hints and clues and what’s already written on the back of the book. In any case, Fairy Tale lives up to its name. It is chock full of references to fairy tales from the particularly important Rumpelstiltskin all they way to a more modern fairy tale like The Wizard of Oz, and it follows the general arc of one well enough itself. It begins with a young Charlie Reade talking of that “goddamn bridge”, the site of his mother’s early death from being struck by a van. His father drinks to cope and loses himself for awhile, a young Charlie losing himself in acts of juvenile delinquency with his friend Bertie Bird. Eventually, Charlie’s father, George, gets sober with the help of a friend and an AA program. Charlie too, above all grateful for his father’s newfound sobriety (though not without his own scars and misgivings on his father’s past actions) gets on the straight and narrow. It is after a bit of time on this road of recovery we see young Charlie meet an injured Mr. Howard Bowditch and his dog Radar. Let’s just say Howard is a taciturn old man with secrets aplenty and Radar his aging German shepherd whom Charlie immediately recognizes as the goodest of bois (To put it another way that doesn’t use internet slang, he loves that dog right away). One of those pesky secrets of Howard’s includes a shed in the backyard, one from which occasionally emerges a rather disturbing noise. Since it is expressly written in the blurb of the book, I’ll describe this shed as akin to a certain wardrobe of fantastical renown. Through it, Charlie will go to another realm to learn a bit of wisdom, experience a bit of that Stephen King macabre, and return to the world a changed young man. If I had to pinpoint that bit of wisdom that Charlie learns, it would be the age old lesson that love can be a powerful thing. Oh, and names. Names can be powerful too. I give this book a hearty recommend.

P.S. In writing this post I realized I somehow completely missed the existence of King’s Dark Tower adjacent books The Talisman and Black House. So that’s a bit of egg on my face. And my TBR just got two books longer.