The New Stephen King Book Just Dropped
Sep. 17th, 2022 07:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingFairy Tale is excellent. I really enjoyed it.
It's a portal fantasy that manages to pull off a teenage viewpoint character without becoming YA fiction, and it references themes from the Dark Tower universe without making any direct connections. There is a dog, and the dog is a good girl, and it's important to note that the dog lives.
My criticism should probably be that there are a lot of floating characters that never really go anywhere, but I don't actually care. Not every character needs to be directly important to the main story, and not every character needs a fully developed backstory. The hardcover book is already 600 pages long, and it feels like the perfect length.
What Fairy Tale feels like to me, more than anything, is Dark Souls fanfiction. Now that I've played Dark Souls I keep comparing everything to Dark Souls, but I think it's an apt comparison in this case. Essentially, there is a once-great kingdom that is now abandoned and filled with aggro zombies, and nobody will give the protagonist a straight answer about what happened. What King does extraordinarily well is to describe the protagonist's process of navigating the maze of the empty city, which is eventually followed by his navigation of the empty castle at the center of the city. Just excellent environmental description all around.
If you've played any of the Souls games, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about when you read Fairy Tale, but the best comparison I can give otherwise is actually the third book in the Dark Tower series, The Waste Lands. This is the one where Roland and friends go to the monster city of Lud and spend a truly incredible amount of quality time exploring the postapocalyptic urban space. It's everything I love about video games, but with the added attractions of dick jokes and cocaine references.
Another nice thing about Fairy Tale is its illustrations. Damn I love when books have good art.
It's a portal fantasy that manages to pull off a teenage viewpoint character without becoming YA fiction, and it references themes from the Dark Tower universe without making any direct connections. There is a dog, and the dog is a good girl, and it's important to note that the dog lives.
My criticism should probably be that there are a lot of floating characters that never really go anywhere, but I don't actually care. Not every character needs to be directly important to the main story, and not every character needs a fully developed backstory. The hardcover book is already 600 pages long, and it feels like the perfect length.
What Fairy Tale feels like to me, more than anything, is Dark Souls fanfiction. Now that I've played Dark Souls I keep comparing everything to Dark Souls, but I think it's an apt comparison in this case. Essentially, there is a once-great kingdom that is now abandoned and filled with aggro zombies, and nobody will give the protagonist a straight answer about what happened. What King does extraordinarily well is to describe the protagonist's process of navigating the maze of the empty city, which is eventually followed by his navigation of the empty castle at the center of the city. Just excellent environmental description all around.
If you've played any of the Souls games, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about when you read Fairy Tale, but the best comparison I can give otherwise is actually the third book in the Dark Tower series, The Waste Lands. This is the one where Roland and friends go to the monster city of Lud and spend a truly incredible amount of quality time exploring the postapocalyptic urban space. It's everything I love about video games, but with the added attractions of dick jokes and cocaine references.
Another nice thing about Fairy Tale is its illustrations. Damn I love when books have good art.
