“A teenager inherits a Maine estate and discovers a portal to a fairy-tale world that has gone wrong.”
What's in this book
- Stephen King's 2022 portal fantasy - seventeen-year-old Charlie Reade inherits a shed that leads to another world
- Late-career King in conscious dialogue with Brothers Grimm, L. Frank Baum, and Andrew Lang
- 608 pages of patient portal-fantasy worldbuilding across Empis and a quest for Charlie's dying dog Radar
- Goodreads Choice Best Horror nominee 2022; basis for the in-development Paul Greengrass film
- Seth Numrich audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of The Dark Tower series, 11/22/63, The Eyes of the Dragon, and canonical Stephen King portal fantasy
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Fairy Tale is Stephen King's 2022 portal-fantasy novel, the kind of late-career King book that admits its influences openly and builds a 600-page narrative around them. Charlie Reade, a Sentry, Illinois teenager raised by a recovering-alcoholic father, befriends an elderly neighbor named Howard Bowditch and his German Shepherd Radar. When Bowditch dies, Charlie inherits the house, the dog, and the shed in the backyard with the portal to a parallel world called Empis.
King's influences are signposted (the Grimm fairy tales, the Wizard of Oz, the John Bellairs young-adult horror, his own Dark Tower series), and the novel reads as deliberate homage. The Empis sections in the back half are darker than the marketing suggested. The Radar-restoring-her-youth subplot is the structural and emotional engine. King is in patient mode throughout, with the first two hundred pages spent in the Sentry, Illinois suburbs before Charlie ever steps into the shed.
Recommended for King readers who enjoy his fantasy mode (the Dark Tower books, Eyes of the Dragon), for fans of portal-fantasy YA crossover (Lev Grossman's Magicians, Susanna Clarke's Piranesi), and for readers looking for books like Fairy Tale in the patient-grandfather-Stephen-King register. Four solid stars and one of the strongest late-career King novels.
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