A novel about a 17-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for that world or ours.
There’s plenty of fresh invention in Fairy Tale, but much of what Charlie encounters reminds him of something else he’s seen or read ... King’s portals — like his novels — have always been leaky apertures, prone to cultural exchange and playful cross-contamination ... Fairy Tale is a multiverse-traversing, genre-hopping intertextual mash-up, with plenty of Easter eggs for regular King devotees. Thankfully, it’s also a solid episodic adventure, a page-turner driven by memorably strange encounters and well-rendered, often thrilling action ... Despite the plot’s twists and turns, the biggest surprise Fairy Tale has to offer King’s so-called Constant Readers might be the book’s promise of a happy ending ... I’ll bet many readers hungry for a genuinely feel-good adventure won’t care what tactics King uses to deliver the goods: These days, some of us will take all the happy endings we can get, however unlikely they seem.
A good old-fashioned Stephen King fantasy-horror epic ... You’ll inhale Fairy Tale in big 100-page swathes without the slightest effort or strain, and you’ll be grateful that there are 600-plus pages of it to remind you several times over how much fun that kind of reading experience is ... The book’s alternate world combines Grimmian fairy-tale elements with Lovecraftian cosmic horror, but it takes a while to get there. The more of them I read, the more I appreciate King’s set-ups ... Injecting the uncanny into the everyday is a Stephen King trademark ... Fairy Tale supplies both fleshly human frailty and a fully functional heart ... Fairy Tale is both sweeping and self-contained, comic and scary, touching and bleak.
... an epic quest novel with a golden-haired hero and his beloved pooch who save a cursed people from an even more cursed villain. Surprisingly unscary, the book offers a journey through an enchanted world ... It’s a whopping read, just shy of 600 pages, and there are times the reader wonders if it really needed to be that long. There is some repetition...and a lot of signposting and foreshadowing that’s anything but subtle. But if you’re a fan of King, then you’ll be delighted to disappear into this charming coming-of-age tale and cheer for Charlie as he frees an oppressed people from a tyrannical ruler ... It’s a tale as old as time.
