Stephen King's Fairy Tale Book Review

 Fairy Tale 

by Stephen King 

Published Year : 2022

Page Count : 607 pages

Medium Used : Kindle Scribe

Genre : Dark Fantasy, Multiverse, Parallel Words, Magic and Sorcery, Young Adult, Prince and Princesses, 2025-Read.

Rating : 4.75/5

Stephen King, I am surprised to say, has thoroughly impressed me with this book. It is not his comfortable space of horror and creepy settings but he has written it with flair and acumen. He has created a world that was in chaos and ailing but is reverted to normalcy when a seventeen year old makes his journey to the world to rescue his dying German Shepard dog. There is a staircase with one hundred and eighty five steps leading from a shed in Illinios to the underground world. The boy and his predecessor who owned the shed took great care to keep this pathway hidden from the  prying eyes of humans who would - who knows - obviously go to great lengths to seize and exploit a new, untouched, nascent world. The people in this world are stuck with a virulent disease called the gray disease that makes their skin color go gray and also slowly closes their bodies up. There are some among them who are immune to the disease but those healthy individuals are round up and murdered/killed for fun by the maniac/evil king of the land. The story revolves around how the young boy with his dog defeats the wild king who has sold his soul to the devil and prevents not only the death of this world called Emphis but also many in succession. There are a few scenes which are creepy as hell - but they definitely didn't resemble Stephen King's usual style. I joked with a friend that if this book is put through a similarity check engine of Natural Language Processing, it would give a low rating for Stephen King. He has come across as a very refined writer with this book. He has embodied the personality of a budding, inexperienced but a very strong, athletic boy Charlie Reade and written it not like King himself.  

This is not an ordinary fairy tale. There are magical creatures that sleep underground and which when woken up, wreak havoc. There are passageways that lead from one world to another, directly connecting them. There are equipment that can alter the age of living beings along with their thoughts and body mechanisms. There are dead bodies walking, talking and fighting around. There are skeleton men ensconced in blue electricity that fry anything touching them. There is a prince from a magical world - perhaps, the scientific developments of our world look more magical to them than age reduction, mermaid like creatures they possess - and a princess who had been rendered speechless by a curse. She tears apart a scar that closes her mouth, kisses the prince full and deep - but that is the extent to which this resembles a regular fairy tale. There are startling ways to kill these electric men and giant women which thrilled me and amazed me. I would highly recommend this to anyone who is a fan of dark fantasy and Stephen King's imaginary concoctions. The reason I am not awarding this a full 5 pointer is that there are some lingering, unanswered questions still in mine - maybe they strike many a reader the same way. Like .. why did the two moons which are chasing each other perpetually, choose to collide with each other the very night Charlie and others try to tackle the maniac king? Why does the creature from the underground give the dastardly fate to the king who is loyal to it? Why does the creature respond the way it did to Charlie and shiver, stutter when he has called it by its name ? I think these are very minor questions and there is a perfectly explicable reason behind them but for now, my mind is restless and pondering over the story to get some answers. If any of you have answers, please post them in a comment. Thanks!