Fairy Tale - Stephen King
There are some authors whose work I like, and some who I consider myself a fan of. To me, that's an important distinction, and King is very much in the second category.
Something strange happens when I'm a fan of an author, which is that I get a very minor anxiety any time they release a new book. I often put off reading it because I'm worried that this will be one of the ones that I don't like. If I wasn't a fan it wouldn't matter, I would simply DNF and move on, but because I'm a fan I don't want to be disappointed.
To that end I put off reading Fairy Tale for two years. The hardback has been sitting on my shelf staring at me every day. And, now that I've finally read it, my mildest fears have come true. Fairy Tale is a major disappointment.
It starts well. The opening chapters - maybe the first third of the book - are classic King. A small town, a bunch of characters dealing with their small but important demons, and a slowly unravelling mystery. Something King excels at is introducing us to a world gently, lowering us into it in the same way as you slide into an overly-hot bath. I loved everything about Charlie meeting Mr. Bowditch and Radar, of their slowly-forming bond, of the mystery of what lay beneath Bowditch's shed. It becomes clear quickly that we're talking about a portal to another world, and with the references to Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came and the old revolver that Charlie straps to his hip, I knew we were in Dark Tower territory. And I love The Dark Tower. I was in.
Unfortunately the good stuff is front-loaded here. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but once Charlie leaves our world and enters the Other it stops feeling like a King novel and starts to feel like a pale imitation. Even at its most outlandish The Dark Tower remains grounded in a strong sense of reality that I never got from Fairy Tale, and the effect was that nothing that happens in that other world felt meaningful. At its best it's just okay; at its worst it feels like clumsy pastiche, and if you told me sections of this were ghost-written I would believe you.
I've always admired the way that King puts us in the heads of his characters. They always feel real, lived-in, complex and understandable even when they're doing things that should repel us. That's true for the opening section of the book, but once Charlie steps into the other world it disappears. I felt distant from him in a way I'm not used to with King, disconnected from the character despite the first person narration that should pull us even closer. Part of that, I think, is that I never really got a sense of stakes here. Charlie is in mortal danger but he never seems to feel it. The result of that is that we don't feel it, either, and the disconnect between his internal world and what's happening to him physically makes it hard to feel invested in anything that's happening to him.
This is especially true after Radar has been healed and Charlie finds himself in captivity. The strongest emotional connection we have in the book is to this poor old dying dog. Once that time pressure to heal Radar is over, a lot of the reason to care about the book vanished for me. Even though Radar isn't present after that point and we don't know where she is Charlie never really seems to care or to worry about what might be happening to her, and that makes it hard to care about him.
Fairy Tale desperately wants to be a Dark Tower novel. Charlie is very much a nascent gunslinger on his first quest, and the bond between him and Radar is very reminiscent of the bond between Jake and Oy. But everything - from the strange world built from literary references, to the tale of political machinations with a deposed royal family - feels like a pale reflection of the world of the Dark Tower, a sub-standard imitation that's trying and failing to reignite old magic.
This may be my biggest disappointment of the year.
- Publisher – Hodder
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £10.99 paperback | £5.49 Kindle
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