Fairy Tale by Stephen KingMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Let's start with what this book is not. It's not a horror novel, that should be fairly obvious and it's not entirely a fantasy novel because a good third of the book is slice of life stuff, which many have said and I agree, is the best part of the tale.
The story is about a teenager named Charlie who befriends a curmudgeonly old man in whose house is a portal to another world. This part of the story - the teen dealing and sometimes caring for his recovering alcoholic father, his evolving friendship with the old man and mostly his love for the old man's dog who is the best character in the book - is King at his best and far outshines anything that comes later.
Once the teenager goes through the portal, the story just wades through with many rather bland characters, though this may be attributed to the first person narration because we're always in Charlie's head. As a fantasy story it didn't really work for me, the heroes and villains and overall story was pretty flat.
There's another (or rather two) pet peeves I have with the book. King is constantly bringing up pop culture references in order to describe what Charlie's experiencing, including referencing his own books! This takes you out of the story and is unnecessary, I mean if you can't write a fantasy story without bringing up Game of Thrones, then you shouldn't be writing one. The other is something that King has included more and more of in his recent novels - his left wing politics. He doesn't do it often here but when he does it's very jarring, taking you completely out of the story since it's so out of place.
Also some have said that this book has a Lovecraftian feel to it, and though he does name drop Lovecraft several times, this is not cosmic horror by any means.
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