Fairy Tale (2022)

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1984 was a big year for Stephen King fantasy fiction. Both The Eyes of the Dragon (still the author’s sole experiment with straightforward fantasy) and The Talisman, a multi-world fantasy co-written with good friend Peter Straub. By then he’d practically created the shared universe concept decades before the MCU with the Dark Tower series, which retroactively made any of his previous work part of a King multiverse. Sadly, Straub passed away the week Fairy Tale was released, a coincidence I’m certain both men could appreciate.

Despite the promise of its title and description, Fairy Tale is closer in tone and substance to 11/22/63, another high-concept King tale from 2011 where an underground time-traveling portal led to an adventure that felt more procedural than fantastical. Only instead of traveling back to 1950s America to save JFK from assassination, Fairy Tale imagines a world completely different from our own, yet closer than you’d think. In fact, it’s right in your backyard.

Meet Charlie Reade, a 17-year-old left to be raised alone by his father, a recovering alcoholic, after the horrible death of his mother in a horrible road accident some years back. Charlie’s life takes a surprising turn when he happens upon his curmudgeonly old neighbor, Howard Bowditch, who’d broken his leg and hip after falling from his ladder. Bowditch recruits his teenage savior to help nurse him back to health and, while in recovery, the two form a bond the way complete opposites often do.

Charlie especially takes to Radar, Bowditch’s aged female German shepherd who will become his best friend and the major driving force of the story. Fairy Tale may present itself as a multidimensional fantasy adventure but, deep down, it’s really just the tale of a boy who really loves his dog.

As their relationship deepens Charlie learns that his debilitated neighbor has been keeping many secrets: why is Bowditch selling a fortune in gold pellets? Where did they come from? Who’s the funny little man shouting “right-o” when people start getting murdered? And just how old is he, anyway?

These answers, and many others, will come once Charlie begins to investigate the shed behind Bowditch’s house, a shed with a hole that spiraled down, down, down. Follow it down further and you’ll soon reach the kingdom of Empis, a magical world where two moons dotted the sky, insects are giant, and the words that sprang forth from your own mouth conform to its local syntax and grammar. A place of fairy tales, a cursed land in need of a hero. A prince, perhaps?

So much of the joy of discovering a ‘new world’ comes from the experience of doing just that, so at the risk of spoiling that moment let me just say that Empis is a place both familiar and still totally fantastical, a place with man-eating giants, of savage combat, and where slave-labor powers electric lights. But Empis also houses something worth the risk: a magic sundial that can reverse the aging process, even in dogs.

As a protagonist it’s difficult to identify with Charlie, at least how King portrays him. Tall, athletic, popular at school…the kid has it going on. When Charlie talks about his past bad behaviors they almost come across as a counterbalance to his near-perfection, like a ‘beauty mark’ on a supermodel. Whether his vanilla, almost anonymous personality is by design, perhaps a commentary on the classic Hero’s Journey (indeed, after long exposure in Empis Charlie literally starts transforming into a fairy tale prince) or it could be…something else.

While never spoken or even suggested, I can’t help but feel the magic world of Empis itself may be a construct of Charlie’s imagination, an amalgamated fantasy land created around his own imagination and influences. So much of Charlie’s personality is reflected through his personal experiences, some real and some literary, it feels as if “his” Empis would be different from what Bowditch experienced, his version of a world built upon H. P. Lovecraft’s unexplainable literary horrors but with all the familiarity of a Rumpelstiltskin parable.

Even the story is framed in a past-tense narrative of a writer ‘becoming’ a writer, such an intrinsically Stephen King motif (and so many other authors), that the meta-implications are irresistible. Maybe this would explain Charlie’s frequent callbacks to pop-culture movies and things, which are closer to what a 75-year old Stephen King would remember than a modern nostalgia-cribbing teenager, like when he likens Radar to “the guy in the M*A*S*H TV show.”

Is Charlie a standin for Stephen King? There’s a sense of deep melancholy running throughout Fairy Tale, especially during scenes when King describes Charlie agonizing about his mother’s fatal hit-and-run accident, or Howard Bowditch’s convalescence and recovery. It’s almost impossible to read through these moments and not imagine the author reliving his own trauma surviving similar events; who wouldn’t want to escape to another world in times like that?

I did want to mention how each chapter is prefaced with gorgeous woodblock-like illustrations by Gabriel Rodríguez (a collaborator with King’s son Joe Hill on NOS4A2) and Nicolas Delort, which is always a treat.

Fairy Tale isn’t for the impatient reader, nor is it likely to impress modern fantasy fans who’ve come to expect exposition galore explaining each and everything with world-building excess. At its heart, this is Stephen King giving past glories another go, maybe for his sake or as a gift to his longtime readers. It’s ironic the opening is so much more compelling in its dedication to its real world over its fantastical counterpart. Still, it’s remarkable to see King still reaching for something grander and more ambitious than most, even if it feels like he’s become a little too comfortable playing the hits. But man, what hits they are.