Stephen King's 'Fairy Tale' Has Some Issues

A discussion, not a review.

I’m currently reading Stephen King’s fantasy novel, Fairy Tale, and for the most part I find it enjoyable enough. It’s the story of a teenage boy who befriends an elderly gentleman and his aged dog, Radar, after the old man has a bad fall and the boy, Charlie, decides to help watch his dog and the man’s big, mysterious old house.

I won’t spoil it (at least not in this post) anymore than the title of the novel itself does: What begins in the mundane world slowly becomes a tale of magic—a fairy tale that bridges the real world and another. King does a wonderful job teasing out the mysteries. He’s a master of the page-turner, giving us juicy little morsels at the end of each chapter, hints at bad things to come. It’s slow-paced but engaging, a typically folksy Stephen King yarn and yet . . .

I’m beginning to wonder if the problems with this book will continue to pile up to the point where it’s hard for me to enjoy it as much as I hoped I would after hearing some rave reviews. I’m not a massive Stephen King fan (though I did stop to take photos of his house in Bangor, Maine when we drove through in 2019) but I’ve enjoyed a number of his books over the years. Enough to sit down with a 600-page tome and commit.

Two problems have surfaced for me at this point, outside of some of the mostly forgivable pacing issues.

Grandpa Charlie

First off, the narrator.

This is a first-person story told from the perspective of Charlie Reade, who is 17 during the events of the book, which takes place in 2013. Charlie does not seem like a kid from 2013, and not because he’s presented as some kind of outcast. Almost all of Charlie’s pop cultural references are to movies and books from decades ago. Psycho, Logan’s Run, Cujo, Skeletor, etc.

There are effectively zero references to anything more modern. Charlie bikes everywhere and instead of texting, he emails people. In 2013, I was 32. 17-year-old Charlie feels quite a lot older than me. At first, it’s not a big deal. A Psycho reference makes perfect sense. I think it was the mention of Logan’s Run that really threw me for a loop and made me realize that this kid is actually growing up in the 80s.

It feels . . . sloppy. Lazy, even. Like King couldn’t be bothered to write a modern-day teen so he just didn’t. But then, why not set this in the 70s or 80s instead? The book doesn’t need cell phones or laptop computers. Honestly, if this story took place in 1985, it would be way better and more believable.

White America

The second issue is interesting mostly because it gives us a little insight into King’s mindset these days. Like so many people, I think King bonked his head on the Trump era and it addled his brain a little bit. He’s become quite vocal on Twitter (which is fine, it’s his right) and I don’t really care one way or another about his politics. I’m sure we agree on lots of stuff.

What bugs me is King’s decision to insert random political messaging into a story like Fairy Tale when it makes absolutely no sense. Take, for instance, this passage where Charlie encounters a crush at his high school. “Charlie?” she says.

“It was Arnetta Freeman, looking relatively gorgeous in her skinny jeans and shell top. With blue eyes and blond hair down to her shoulders, Arnetta proved that white America ain’t all bad.” (page 186)

Wait, what?

Up to this point in the book, there’s been no discussion of race or politics of any kind. The narrator is a 17-year-old white kid who has not mused on political issues or race relations in any way. And now suddenly, his very first description of a girl at his school includes a weird throwaway line about how her apparent cuteness proves that “white America ain’t all bad.”

This is perplexing on so many levels. For one thing, it just comes out of nowhere and sounds more like Stephen King on Twitter than Charlie Reade, the mostly apolitical teen football star and generally nice guy. Second of all, if blond hair and blue eyes prove that white America ain’t all bad, well I give you Fox News:

It’s an incoherent sentence that makes no sense in this story or for this character. It’s bizarre and jarring and immediately took me out of the book. I don’t care what King himself thinks about white America, or what I think, or what anyone thinks. This isn’t a book that deals with race! Charlie has been taking care of an elderly white man this whole time who he has become deeply fond of, but now with this white chick he likes we get political commentary?

A few pages later (and here we brush up against some spoilers, though not really anything that matters too much) when Charlie first ventures into the fairy tale land, he encounters a woman who is weirdly disfigured with gray skin who can’t really talk, but only makes semi-intelligible sounds. Charlie asks her if she understands him and then:

“She nodded and then made a gesture I knew well: a thumb-and-forefinger circle which means okey-dokey pretty much the world over. (Except, I guess, in certain rare cases where imbeciles flash it to mean whites rule.)” (page 193)

Once again, you have a perfectly normal encounter where someone makes an okay symbol and instead of just continuing the story, King inserts his commentary on what he thinks of white supremacists who use that symbol to mean ‘white power’ or whatever. It’s even in parentheses! Honestly, I shrugged off the previous instance of this weird political notation, but once I hit this one I was so yanked out of the narrative I had to stop for a minute. I decided I should write about it because I found it so absolutely mind-bogglingly out-of-place and out-of-touch.

Again, there are problems beyond just the weirdness of including this when it doesn’t fit Charlie’s character at all. This story takes place in 2013, for one thing. The okay sign didn’t become a symbol for anything other than “okay” until 2017, when trolls at 4chan came up with it as a hoax. There’s literally no reason that Charlie, a 17-year-old in 2013, would even consider the okay symbol meaning anything other than okay four years prior to the 4chan stuff.

And even if we argue that Charlie is narrating in the future (it’s a past-tense story, after all) it still makes no sense to include this kind of bizarre editorializing. We should be in the narrator’s mind in the moment even if it’s a story being told later on. If you want the narrator’s current thoughts to come through, you have to find a way to do that that doesn’t throw us out of the story being told. Some stories do this. Think A Christmas Story which uses an adult voice to narrate over the story of Ralphie’s younger self. But even though we get a few moments like this in Fairy Tale, it’s mostly the kind of narration that grounds us in the story of Charlie as a 17-year-old.

Just a 17-year-old that also happens to be a 75-year-old, since Stephen King can’t seem to draw more than a very blurry line between himself and his character.

I don’t think King should avoid writing his politics into his books. It’s more about how this is achieved. You can tell a political story, make a political message and it can be effective and powerful. King has written politically charged stories in the past. But to just randomly insert political notations in the middle of an apolitical fairy tale weakens the overall narrative and, for this reader at least, breaks immersion for no real reason.

We’ll see. The last King book I read was The Outsider, which I enjoyed. The HBO adaptation of that novel, however, was in many ways quite a bit better, especially the ending.

Have you read Fairy Tale? What did you think?

I have a video discussion of this issue below: