Book Review: Fairy Tale by Stephen King

About the Book

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

This is a magnificent and terrifying tale in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy—and his dog—must lead the battle.

My Review

I made it halfway through, and then I had to give up… I just found it such a slog by that point that I was literally reading everything else in my queue to delay getting back to it. Which stinks doubly, because the beginning felt like classic King and was absolutely wonderful. Ironically, the magical world was the least magical part of the entire book for me.

I absolutely loved the way this one started and literally right up to the point of transitioning between worlds it was still a fabulous story that had me in thrall and I couldn’t wait to see what would come next, especially since world-building building tends to be one of King’s biggest strengths. But like a number of other readers, I just found Empis to feel somehow less interesting than the regular world left behind. I don’t know if it was the characters, although it might have been – Bowditch was hands down my favorite part of this book, and none of the characters in Empis jumped off the page for me the way he did. Maybe it’s because the “evil taking over the world and only a child (albeit an almost- adult one) can fight it” thing feels like it’s been done so many times, including by King, that even in his more than capable hands it felt like a road too well-traveled to hold my interest the way I wanted it to.

Ultimately I don’t know what it was, but I forced myself to slog through a significant number of pages before I finally realized that I wasn’t taking anything else away from this book except a page count, and that’s when I stopped. I may come back to it. There are a number of readers who absolutely love it. But I suspect I won’t, and that this is just one of the King books that didn’t resonate with me. There are a number of them, and although the vast majority of his works don’t fall in that category, a small handful do and it is what it is… The read was worth it for the first third or so alone, and I’m ok with that.