They have survived through the ages, retold and repurposed, but always leaving an impression in the memories of our childhood. (Lovecraft, in particular, was a writer who never confronted his own propensity for hatred, and his work is the worse for it.) But hatred is also a kind of power, especially for a storyteller, and King had me madly hungering for the moment when his novel’s eminently loathsome villains got their comeuppance.Fairy tales and nursery rhymes are some of the most world’s powerful stories. An abiding theme in King’s work is that every human being has the potential to do evil, and that only by acknowledging this and remaining vigilant against it can we hope to live moral lives. I had hated him for awhile and hated myself for hating.” Hate is as great a force in this novel as love, and it turns out to be the taproot of Empis’ curse. There are times during Fairy Tale when Charlie is obliged to tap into “that dark well I’d discovered as a child, when my father seemed bent on honoring the memory of his wife, my mother, by crashing and burning and leaving us homeless. Netflix’s Smuttiest Show Has Some Very Peculiar Ideas About the Male AnatomyĪfter 50 Years of Hip-Hop, It’s Time to Legalize the Idea at Its Core I Cannot Stop Laughing at This Prince Harry Book Display
His father loses his job, the bills pile up, and Charlie begins to wonder if they’ll end up living in their car or under a highway overpass.Īre We Finally Ready to See One of the ’90s’ Most Acclaimed Bands for What It Really Was? His insurance-adjuster father drowns his grief in alcohol, and for a while Charlie himself goes wrong, palling around with a bad seed and engaging in destructive and occasionally cruel pranks. When Charlie, an only child, is 8, his mother goes out to pick up a fried chicken dinner for the family and is hit by a truck skidding on an icy bridge grating. Instead, he first carefully builds a portrait of Charlie’s present-day life in the small Illinois town of Sentry’s Rest.
Not for King, the brisk dispensing of the mundane real world in favor of the thrilling vistas of Narnia or Wonderland. His hero, high school senior Charlie Reade, doesn’t begin his trek down the stone stairs spiraling underground in his neighbor’s backyard until about a quarter of the way through the book.
The more of them I read, the more I appreciate King’s set-ups. The book’s alternate world combines Grimmian fairy-tale elements with Lovecraftian cosmic horror, but it takes a while to get there.
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