“A teenager inherits a Maine estate and discovers a portal to a fairy-tale world that has gone wrong.”
Buy this book
Books N Bytes participates in affiliate programs including Amazon Associates and Bookshop.org. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links at no extra cost to you.
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.
Related reads
If you liked Fairy Tale
It
by Stephen King
It by Stephen King 1986 review. Seven friends return to Derry, Maine, to face the shape-shifting evil they fought as children. One of the great American novels about childhood and the past.
The Stand
by Stephen King
The Stand by Stephen King 1978 (and 1990 Complete & Uncut) review. A weaponized plague kills 99 percent of humanity. The survivors are pulled toward Boulder or toward Las Vegas, and the novel that follows is one of the great American epics of its decade.
11/22/63
by Stephen King
11/22/63 by Stephen King 2011 review. An English teacher discovers a portal to 1958 and decides to stop the Kennedy assassination. The single best late-King novel and the rare time-travel book that earns its 849 pages.
A Clash of Kings
by George R. R. Martin
A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin 1998 review. Five claimants vie for the Iron Throne while a comet crosses the sky over Westeros. The middle volume of A Song of Ice and Fire and the one most committed Martin readers consider his peak.
A Game of Thrones
by George R. R. Martin
A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin 1996 review. The book that rewrote what epic fantasy was allowed to do. Westeros, the Iron Throne, the deaths nobody saw coming. Required reading.
American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
American Gods by Neil Gaiman 2001 review. An ex-convict named Shadow takes a job as bodyguard to a strange man named Wednesday and learns the old gods of immigration are still here, dying slow. The defining American urban fantasy of the 2000s.
More by this author