Fairy Tale (novel)

Did You Know?

• The release date was announced by Entertainment Weekly on January 24, 2022, which also featured an excerpt from the book.
• On August 11, 2022, Simon & Schuster featured King on their YouTube page narrating a chapter from Fairy Tale as part of its promotion.
• On October 16, 2024, Deadline Hollywood reported the project was being turned into a ten-episode series with J.H. Wyman as showrunner.

Plot

Charlie Reade is a seventeen-year-old living in Sentry's Rest, Illinois, with his father George, a widower. When Charlie was seven, a van struck and killed his mother. His father sank into alcoholism afterward but eventually got sober with support from a friend and coworker, though Charlie still worries he might relapse. One day in April 2013, Charlie finds his elderly neighbor, Mr. Howard Bowditch, hurt in his yard.

Grateful for his father's recovery, Charlie agrees to look after Mr. Bowditch's old German Shepherd, Radar, while the man is in the hospital, and continues caring for both when Mr. Bowditch returns home. During this time, Mr. Bowditch gives Charlie a .45 caliber handgun and shows him a hidden supply of gold pellets he uses to pay medical bills. Months later, Radar's health worsens, and Mr. Bowditch dies of a heart attack. He leaves Charlie a recorded message revealing he was actually 120 years old, and that a locked shed in his backyard holds a portal to another world.

That world contains a magical sundial that granted him long life. Hoping to save Radar, Charlie enters this world, called Empis, where he meets a shoemaker named Dora and exiled members of the Gallien royal family: Leah, Stephen "Woody" Woodleigh, and Claudia. He learns of Flight Killer, a great evil that drove out the royals, cursing the survivors with disabilities and disfigurement, and that the people of Empis suffer from an illness called the gray.

Reception

Matt Bell of The New York Times described Fairy Tale as a solid episodic adventure and a page-turner driven by memorably strange encounters and well-rendered action. The novel topped USA Today's Best-Selling Books list starting the week of September 15, 2022, beating works by Colleen Hoover and Delia Owens. Emilia Ferrante of The Michigan Daily praised King's sense of wonder and storytelling abilities but noted the work walks the line of falling into the familiar trope of equating physical disfigurement with being scary. Kirkus awarded a starred review, calling the book at once familiar and full of odd twists. Alison Flood from The Guardian called it vintage, timeless King.