When a prolific author in his mid-70s publishes a new novel in which a crotchety old man with an aging dog befriends a teenager, you might start wondering how he’s viewing getting older and thinking about legacy. In a lot of ways this book addresses that question with the two character Howard Bowditch and Charlie Reade (and of course the dog Radar).
The novel begins with the narration of Charlie Reade who tells us from a future post about this story from his life, and we get the sense it’s the beginning of things for him. It starts though with the death of his mother, who went out for fried chicken in a red raincoat and never returned, killed in traffic. His father, who was a drinker, became a DRINKER afterward and the early parts of the novel explain how Charlie had to fend for himself, and how he often failed, including becoming a little of a delinquent. But he and his dad started getting their lives together around the time Charlie started high school. Now on the cusp of his senior year, they begin thinking about college. His father has his feet under him but tells him that he’s probably not going to be much help paying for college.
About this time Charlie hears the cries from the “Psycho House”, the scary looking Victorian in the neighbor of some legend. It’s not the vicious guard dog awaiting him, but an older, very concerned and scared German shepherd who leads Charlie to Howard Bowditch, an elderly man in tremendous pain from having fallen from a ladder. Guarded to the end, Howard tells Charlie where to find pain meds, to call 911, and most importantly to take care of Radar. This is the beginning of two very important friendships. We get a lot of evidence early on, including from the title of the book, that there’s some strong connections to the world of fairy tales wrapped in this novel and this friendship, and of course, that’s where we head. Because the book is so new, I will leave the plot there.
The book is good. It’s one of the more enjoyable Stephen King’s I’ve read in a while, and I have generally liked his output for the last decade or so. There’s some very tender writing about dogs in the book, and the main character is very sympathetic. The influences, like with a lot of Stephen King, are obvious and on the page. This book borrows a lot from HP Lovecraft and Roger Zelazny as the two main sources as far as it occurs to me. But if I had to give a logline, this is a mix of Chronicles of Narnia and Dark Souls.