A fairy-tale which wasn’t so fairy, and if it wasn’t, the dark retelling trope wasn’t the reason for that, sadly. There is something missing in this newest book by King in comparison with his old novels. And there is something missing in comparison with other contemporary fantasy books, overall. Because there are authors who may write almost all the same throughout their career, and they are surprisingly good at it. At King’s case, there are times when it works. And there are times when what we get is bland and predictable. Sadly, I think that this was the second type.
King has already written about the AA and dysfunctional families, and while this part, a story of a boy coping with grief and with the problems of his widowed, alcohol-addicted father, is convincing and rings true, it also reminds me too much of how Dan Torrance got over in ‘Doctor Sleep’ eventually. The father ‘overcame’ his addiction, and now Charlie, the protagonist, can lead a ‘normal’ life filled with making pranks with his friends and thinking about how to show himself off to get to the right college. This is one of the reasons why he agrees to look after a mysterious aging man with an equally mysterious house. They become friends, but the older man, Mr Bowditch, dies, leaving a message to Charlie: There’s a portal to another world in his shed, and the world, Empis, has become dangerous due to the unknown and terrifying power. Charlie enters this world with an old dog who once belonged to Bowditch. You can predict the rest, a mix of Narnia and Lev Grossman in your good old King’s style. There are uncanny moments in a land which once was bucolic, there’s a mysterious curse turning people grey and deformed, there’s a Wise Old Woman helping Charlie, there’s an abandoned city with a blood-thirsty giant and a magical clock, there’s an embittered villain serving a Lovecraftian creature, there’s a Noble Princess Charlie has a crush on, and there is a contest apparently based on a certain game from the most famous series by Suzanne Collins… And none of these things couldn’t have been devised by an average fantasy author. None of these things match the original, uncanny ideas present in ‘The Shining’ or ‘It’.
Because, after all, King may be better at writing about our world, about what happens when the uncanny enters it, not when we enter other worlds. What he writes about in ‘Fairy Tale’ would have been original forty years ago, as a dark fairy-tale/Narnia twist, but we live in the 2020s, and many retellings, varying from paranormal romance to precise responds to certain old series, have already emerged. Retellings whose worldbuilding is richer, writing better, and characters more complicated than your average teen trying to do the right thing. Retellings which apply their dark concepts not only to the ‘let’s merge Narnia with Cthulhu’ plot. In ‘Fairy Tale’, the Hunger Games-like competition and a blind awe for the gone royal dynasty go in pair. Empis is a fair world, was so initially, so nothing which might have been questioned in some other world is doubted. We learn, for example, that the royal family has produced many illegitimate children because the commoners where often in love with the royals. It’s hard not to ask whether it was abuse rather than love. But, of course, in a fairy-tale world everything is perfect. The privileged ones do not abuse their power. Their people love them. And they are ready to fight for them. The only solution isn’t something new. The only solution for problems is restoring the old establishment, with a noble princess (and her blond whiteness) as the monarch.
I don’t mean that Stephen King is racist, or a covert grifter, or that he is some hidden pro-monarchist. Actually, you can find progressive, pro-ecological messages in this novel, along with the notion that people, overall, shouldn’t learn about Empis after all the bad they’ve done to the Earth and to other people. I just mean that he, like so many people around us, subconsciously applies other rules to a fictional world than rules he would apply to our world. There are cases when it works, why not. But to my mind, it doesn’t work in his ‘Fairy Tale’.
Left Hand of Fiction 