Today happens to be Stephen King's birthday, so my present for Uncle Stevie is a review of his latest novel!
I was eagerly awaiting King's return to fantasy, and Fairy Tale did not disappoint. It's not a mere retelling of any particular fairy tale, but it's more like the answer to the question, "What if Stephen King wrote a fairy tale?" And there are depths to it that may surprise King newbies, but won't surprise Constant Readers.
Charlie Reade is a high school kid in Illinois (not Maine, oddly enough), living with his recovering alcoholic father and watching perhaps more Turner Classic Movies than any other 17-year-old alive. Charlie befriends a neighborhood curmudgeon and his dog, Radar. He comes to love the dog and eventually the curmudgeon. And before you know it strange things are afoot at the curmudgeon's house.
Actually the stranger things don't start in earnest until about 150 pages in, which didn't bother me at all, because, well, it's King and he's just taking his time with the characters as he often does. 'Salem's Lot is a salient example of how King establishes the characters before the weird shit starts happening to them.
There's a ... wait for it... portal to a fantasy land! And it's weird! Like, super weird, and vaguely based on a mishmash of fairy tales in this world (mostly as collected by the Brothers Grimm), but there's also plenty of patented Stephen King weirdness. It's cliché for true King fans (aka, Constant Readers) to lament the fact that he's pigeonholed as a horror writer, but he does tend to inject a little horror into most of what he does, be it science fiction, romance, mystery, or as the case is here, fantasy.
Our young hero goes on an epic quest to save his dog (heartwarming, that), meeting strange friends and even stranger enemies along the way. And then things take a turn for the worse for poor Charlie, and well, I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll leave it at that.
There's a lot more to say. There's how King writes kids these days (as with the kids in King's recent book The Institute, Charlie has some weirdly retro interests for someone born in the 90's, but is otherwise believable enough). There's what he does with specific fairy tales (and not just the Grimm ones... you may see some Lovecraft, Wizard of Oz, and even Star Wars in there in something like a Wolves of the Calla pastiche). There are specific characters and elements of the plot (man, there are some delightfully evil villains). There's even the obligatory mention of a blue chambray shirt.
But let me say a bit about one of the deeper philosophical themes. Let's call it the depths of darkness.
One of my many failings is that I never got into Carl Jung (the famed early 20th century psychologist), which is a shame because Jung is specifically mentioned several times in Fairy Tale (I think it's just my allergy to what some postmodernists would call meta-narratives, especially those that claim to uncover THE secret of humanity, from astrology to psychoanalysis to Myers-Briggs to sorting people into generations ... people are just messier and more complicated than that!).
But there is something like an exploration of Jung's famous idea of the collective unconscious here, as well as the hero's journey (popularized later by Joseph Campbell) and the concept of a shadow self (although the shadow self is much more clearly explored, of course, in The Dark Half and the Dark Tower books).
My apologies to any Jung experts out there (for I am most definitely not one), but in King's Fairy Tale at least the idea is that there are depths of stories that shape us in ways we don't understand (consider for example that some scholars think versions of some fairy tales may be as many as four thousand years old!), and in just the same way there there are depths of darkness in all of us as individuals. And the most terrifying thing of all--and what King does so well--is that sometimes you may need to tap into these wells of darkness, and sometimes you just might regret doing so.
In the novel this is all symbolized by literally descending into the depths. Charlie descends into the fairy tale realm and then
<mild spoiler ahead>
descends once again to an even more unfathomable realm with hints that there is something even more eldritch waiting beneath THAT. These depths are there, waiting, both for the fairy tales and the noisome horrors, but as King suggests in Fairy Tale: you don't get the fairy tale without the horror. And besides, REAL fairy tales are horrific as fuck.
<end mild spoilers>
It's all pretty deep, but as with most of King's work, it's nonetheless entertaining. Few contemporary authors share King's ability to tap into those wells of humanity where dwell our deepest dreams and nightmares that may well exceed our cognitive grasp, but which nonetheless make us who we are.
I'm not sure there's anything to Jung's collective unconscious, but maybe I'm coming around, at least when it comes to stories, or at the very least I understand why the idea is so seductively fruitful for creative types. One thing I can say: if there is a collective unconscious, King continues to explore it unlike anyone else.
So happy birthday, Uncle Stevie!
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