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A review by ravensandlace
Fairy Tale by Stephen King
3.0
Title: Fairy Tale
Author: Stephen King
Genre: Fantasy Horror
Format: ebook
Series: NA
Star Rating: 3 stars
tw: parental death, alcoholism, fall, injury, cancer, death, hospital setting, gun violence, infant death, murder, blood violence
Stephen King is an interesting author. There are a lot of people that love him a lot and there are others that can’t stand him. I’ve only read one other book by him and that was Carrie. If I’m being honest, I am intimated by him and his sheer volume of work. So when my book club (not my YA Not club) chose this as the book of the month, I was pretty excited as I finally had a reason to pick up some more Stephen King books. But honestly, this book was a bit of a miss.
For starters, is King paid by the word? He just puts down every single word he thinks of. It started to be a bit much. This book could have easily been 300 pages as opposed to 600 pages. There was definitely a strong need for editing. There were also certain phrases he kept repeating over and over. There was one phrase “Of course that’s not what he said”. It was literally on every single page. After the fifteenth time seeing it, I wanted just to throw the book. We get it! Empis has a different way of speaking than Charlie, the main character. It started to get so old.
I also noticed that King cannot write teenagers or at least teenagers from this decade. The main character, Charlie, talks like someone from the 1950s but this book occurred in 2013. There was so much weird slang and the way he talked about the internet was odd. I’m not sure if King has grandkids or not, but if he does have them, he could have benefitted from chatting with them especially if they are teenagers. It just threw me off so badly. One thing I did like about him was that he wasn’t afraid to express emotion. He gave his dad hugs and told him he loved him all the time. That was refreshing to see because so often we don’t see teen boys express their emotions without being made fun of it. It was lovely to see his dad encourage expressions of emotions.
There were a couple more problems that I had with this book. One was this book relied on you knowing fairy tales, especially the original fairy tales. The Grimm fairy tales were talked about a lot and I honestly haven’t read them. I think I remember one of them in a college course I took but other than that, I truly don’t know these fairy tales. I know that Disney made them a lot happier than what they were originally intended. I confess that I don’t know many of the original fairy tales. So I was kind of at a loss at some parts of the story.
My other problem was with the world, Empis. I don't quite understand the lore or how it came to be. It was just kind of confusing. It just seemed like a mishmash of different types of fairy tales all piled together in one. And, as I mentioned above, I don’t know much about the original fairy tales, I was pretty confused for the most part. It didn’t help that Charlie spent most of his time in Empis in prison. So we got to know about the prison pretty extensively.
Overall, the book was okay but it wasn’t the best and I had a lot of problems with it. I won't give up on Stephen King, however. I have acquired It and The Shining thanks to some luck in thrifting. I have also heard that some of his older work is better so I’ll keep trying.