Stephen King

Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes deep into the well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for their world or ours. Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. Then, when Charlie is 17, he meets a dog named Radar and his aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it. Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world. King’s storytelling in Fairy Tale soars. This is a magnificent and terrifying tale about another world than ours, in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy – and his dog – must lead the battle. Early in the Pandemic, King asked himself: “What could you write that would make you happy?” “As if my imagination had been waiting for the question to be asked, I saw a vast deserted city—deserted but alive. I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street. I saw smashed statues (of what I didn’t know, but I eventually found out). I saw a huge, sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds. I saw a magic sundial that could turn back time. Those images released the story I wanted to tell.”

Fairy Tale

Rose

You never know where the trapdoors are in your life, do you? 

“A brave man helps. A coward just gives presents.”

Gotta love some trauma on the second page of the book

Alesha Clifford

If the old wooden bridge had never been replaced by one made of steel, my mother might still be alive.

Dissing disabled people is crap behavior, even if the disabled person in question happens to be an asshole who whacks his son and casts aspersions on your mother.

You get used to the amazing, that's all. Mermaids and IMAX, giants and cell phones. If it's in your world, you go with it. It's wonderful, right? Only look at it another way, and it's sort of awful. Think Gogmagog is scary? Our world is siting on a potentially world-ending supply of nuclear weapons, and if that’s not black magic, I don't know what is.

I remember thinking that we all are, really, just ghosts on the face of the earth trying to believe we have weight and a place in the world.

Brittany Levely-Connolly

…but I had to show her. She had to see, because seeing is the start of understanding. Of accepting a long-denied truth.

"What are they? Demons? The dead?" "I don't think they can hurt us. But there's power here, no doubt, and not good power.”

Fairy Tale quotes

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