Fairy Tale
This review includes affiliate links. If you purchase something using one of these links, I’ll get a small commission at no extra cost to you.
TL;DR: The beginning of the book? Great! The rest? Meh.
This book presents a conundrum for reviewing, because it started out so strong and I would have read an entire novel based just in the real world of the characters of Mr. Bowditch and Charlie and Charlie’s dad and, of course, Radar the dog.
Charlie is an all around good kid. An athlete, a reader, a loyal son to his recovering alcoholic widowed father, and, as we learn, a good neighbor. He finds Mr. Bowditch injured in the yard of his dilapidated house one day, calls the ambulance, and Charlie is soon begrudgingly welcomed into the life of his misanthrope neighbor. Charlie takes care of him, his house, and his dog during his recovery from a bad broken leg.
It’s a Stephen King book, so there are mysterious happenings early on - scratchings from inside a shed, a bucket of gold pellets…but these mysteries are quickly solved once the reader reaches the second half of the book.
Charlie is let into Mr. Bowditch’s secret - a world known as Empis or The Other that can be reached through his shed. In this fairy tale land there is good and evil, deformed beings, a sundial that reverses aging, a castle, a dungeon, and seemingly everything else you want from a fairy tale or fantasy land.
Except, the story just isn’t there. Perhaps it’s my own taste - apart from the classics of fantasy, I’m not much one for the genre. Perhaps it’s going into with the set expectation of high levels of suspense from Stephen King. Perhaps the book really does just lack the strong storytelling and character connection during the second half.
Whatever the reason, once Charlie found his way to The Other, the story just seemed to fizzle and I found myself skimming pages and having to turn back to remind myself what happened. Would a full-length book about Charlie, Mr. Bowditch, Radar, and a haunted old house have been more riveting? Possibly.
While not my favorite book by a long shot, it’s still an okay read, perhaps more than that for hardcore fantasy fans or people more willing than I to put a book down halfway through and admit they won’t finish it.
As a note, this is one Stephen King book that does not take place in Maine.