aThere was a boy named Charlie. His mother died in a terrible accident when he was young, and his father turned to drink, but Charlie grew up to be a good, strong and intelligent young man. The kind that helps out needy strangers - like the human-hating Mr. Bowditch, who has an elderly dog and dilapidated property. Which, because this is a file King Stephen A novel, you sit on a tunnel that leads to a mysterious world that needs to be rescued from a horrific evil.
King wrote a fictional story in the midst of this pandemic after seeing a mental image of “a vast deserted city - deserted but alive…empty streets, haunted buildings and the head of gargoyles lying upside down in the street… Huge, sprawling mansion with glass towers so high that its edges pierced the clouds” . These photos, he says, “revealed the story I wanted to tell” - although they take a long time to get there. Fairy Tale begins strong in our world, as Charlie mourns the death of his mother, cares for his alcoholic father, slips into bad behavior and then outsmarts himself with good grades and talent in sports. It’s things to come-despite the promise of something fantastical on the horizon, thanks to the “strange freak noise” that comes from Mr. Bowditch’s shed, and the mysterious golden pellet tub in his safe.
When Charlie finally makes his way to the underworld, he finds it inhabited by men and women whose faces are gray and disfigured, their features almost blurred from existence. There are talking horses, geese and clever crickets, but there is something insidious at the center, and Charlie must confront him if he wants to return to his father. “Did I want to be the prince in this dark fairy tale? I didn’t. What I wanted was to get my dog and go home.”
There are different types of King novels, from classic horror novels to He. SheAnd the a lot safe And the the shiningto the bitter reality running man And The Long Walk, the detective stories of Mercedes and its accessories, and the psychological thriller misery. I’m a fan of everything (apart from a really idiot: no thank you, Kristen and Dream Catcher), but my favorite genre of King is his fantasy, from The Talisman (co-written with Peter Straub) to the Dark Tower series. A fairy tale chimes with the echoes of both.
in the spellA boy named Jack must travel across two copies of the United States, his own and a magical one, to save his mother. in dark towerA boy named Jake is drawn into another world, and it may be the key to saving him. King’s stories stack on top of each other just as different versions of fairy tales do; Jake, in The Gunslinger, has a memorable sentence: “Go then. There are other worlds than these.” Charlie was told the exact same thing.
The Fairy Tale also derives from The Well which is The Wizard of Oz, as King often does, and from The Neverending Story’s Fantasia. HP Lovecraft’s claws are also tightly intertwined. As Charlie - who sometimes appears unnaturally good, smart and brave to a 17-year-old - makes his way deeper into this new world, to discover “what sleeps in the dark well” in his heart, he feels increasingly uneasy, and eventually realizes the reason. ‘I was able to make sense of what was so frightening and oddly depressing about empty streets and houses. To use one of Lovecraft’s favorite words, it was Eldrich. And so fairytales and Lovecraftian horror smashed together, and Charlie realized “the great distance—the chasm, the abyss, between the magic of fairy tales, like sundials turning back in time, and the supernatural.”
A fairy tale is an antique and immortal, a terrifying and horrific cure born of multiple lockups that, in true King style, puts its finger on the tender point that is the threshold between childhood and growth.