I actually haven’t read any other reviews of this, so I don’t know if I am in a minority if I say I found this quite charming. It meandered quite a bit, and was perhaps a little slow in places, but overall nailed the old-school fairy tale vibe it was going for, IMO. Maybe I just loved it because of the dog?
Charlie, son of an insurance salesman and a mother gone too soon, is a pretty good kid (this seems like damning with faint praise, but is actually – along with “has common sense” – one of my go to compliments). He made a promise to God, back when his dad was drinking, so when he hears a dog howling on his way home from school one day, he investigates. His subsequent rescue of Mr Bowditch, an excellently cantankerous old man, kicks off his eventual adventure.
Charlie is a great blend of wanting to do the honourable thing, letting pragmatism guide him, and occasionally being just a little bit vengeful. It’s a neat piece of work from King – the characters surrounding Charlie in the other realm are a bit more black and white, so it had the effect (for me) of driving home Charlie’s humanity.
The novel hits all the fairy tale beats, and comes with the usual colourful cast of King characters, homaging the Grimm fairy tales that came before. What I enjoyed about Fairy Tale (and The Outsider & The Institute, for example) is that underneath the violence and horror and supernatural elements in all of King’s books, he’s just a damn good story teller. I found Fairy Tale to be comfort food in story form.