Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Scribner
Review:
Considering that I watch a lot of horror movies and have dabbled into the horror fantasy genre of the webtoon/manhwa realm, I do not read a lot of horror books – not even the thrillers. I really have nothing against it other than the fact that I do not want to indulge in something that is specifically designed to engrain in my brain and terrorize me.
But curiosity tickled my fancy: this author everyone speaks of, Stephen King, why do people waste so much time and effort to read his books and make movies out of them over and over again? I have reached out to his books over and over again, tried to crack open the spine, but for the reasons already stated, I never really jumped into his novels headfirst.
That is until Fairy Tale.
Fairy Tale is one of Stephen King’s latest book written for kids, or at least the younger side of the Young Adult age.
It tells the story of a teenager from the US just recovering from the effects of his dad’s alcohol addiction caused by his mom’s death and his own path to destruction. In his neighborhood is this man, a person so bewildering their town has their own narrative surrounding him. No one knows how old he is, where he is from, why he is mad all the time, and why his house looks creepy all the time. No one knows him until he got injured and it was only Charlie who was around to help him.
It is a simple story: small town, mysterious individual, boy meets grumpy old man, old man who has a secret developed a soft spot for that outcast, and then he gave him his riches. It is simple until it wasn’t.
Reflection:
What struck me the most was that King’s mode of storytelling flawlessly intertwines the imaginary from the real that the reader would sometimes forget that what they are reading is something of fiction not history. He does not say things as an introduction to the world that Charlie has stumbled into rather he writes it as if he needed to remind us that this is what really happened and there was some demented magic in the air that made us all forget that such magic did exist. King’s job was to remind us of the magic of storytelling.
I have seen vlogs and blogs saying that this was too simple, too childish. I would agree that it certainly was but there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Maybe that is what all we need: something simple and innocent. There was nothing super scary or malicious or creeping and crawling in the dark. There was simply a boy who turned into a hero. And maybe that is all the escape that we need: a fairy tale.