Gomagog

 So, after a long absence from reading Stephen King's post Dark Tower novels, I picked up Fairy Tale with a gift card I received for my upcoming birthday.

While not particularly a horror tale (it really falls under the "Dark Fantasy" umbrella more than any other genre), it did not disappoint. (On the other hand, his endings still need a bit of help.)

Anyway, our focus character is Charlie, who's narrating the events from a future time of what happened when he was 17 and living in a Chicago suburb. A reclusive old man falls off a ladder, and Charlie saves him. Which introduces us to Radar, the dog, with whom we spend probably a quarter of the book learning about the care and feeding of said animal. 

Eventually, the old man dies, leaving Charlie with everything, including a pot of gold in his safe and a shed with a well to another world in it. 

Charlie ends up going in with the intention of saving Radar, who is very old and dying, since there's a sundial that works like Bradbury's carousel in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Except...well...he does eventually subtract several years from Radar, but in the process, he winds up trapped in the Fairy Tale world he's part of, becoming a tale in and of himself. 

There are quite a few things I liked in here. King tends to reuse phrases from previous works, and in this particular book, he tells us the roots of some of those phrases. I like the idea presented in here about worlds stacked on worlds, since it echoes The Dark Tower without getting bogged down in the mythology that eventually overtook the narrative. I really was reminded of Walter Jon Williams' Aristoi at a few points as Charlie must confront being dragged out of an ideal into hard reality. 

I enjoyed this quite a bit. It reminded me quite a bit of Eyes of the Dragon, but with less sibling rivalry and much more just enjoying the ride.

This seemed appropriate

So, along about the time the Stay-At-Home orders started, I wound up ordering a new copy of Stephen King's The Stand, which, thankfully, unlike my old copy that I think I donated to the local homeless library a few years back, is the Complete and Uncut version. (There are noticeable differences between versions; the first time I read it was right after the release of the long version. Then several years back, I picked up the original published version on paperbackswap.)

Anyway, for those who've never swam across the ocean that is the 1200 pages...

The set up revolves around a superflu that breaks out in 1990. A manmade shifting antigen flu. With 99.6% fatality rate. That escapes from a California lab with a security guard who gets out before everything locks down. Most of the first hundred pages take us through the initial outbreak and the plethora of death that accompanies it, giving us glimpses of our main characters before the world after gets going. We meet Stu, a quiet man in East Texas, who is one of the first immunes identified by the government, since he was one of the first in contact with Patient Zero. We meet Frannie, of Ogunquit, Maine, who has just found out she's pregnant. We meet Larry, who's new single is going up the charts, but whom is in deep debt following living the high life on the royalties. We meet Nick, a deaf-mute who we first meet getting mugged in Arkansas.

And people die. Quite a few people die. If not of flu, but of the aftermath. Stu, who was sent first to Atlanta, and then to Vermont, winds up meeting Glen, and then hooking up with Frannie and Harold, who is the brother of Frannie's now deceased best friend. Larry escapes from New York with Rita, who ends up ODing upstate. He then meets Nadine and Joe, who have their own issues. Nick meets Tom, a mildly retarded man, and they eventually meet Ralph. In the background, we have The Dark Man, Randal Flagg, and Mother Abigail, the 108 year old black woman who still bakes her own biscuits. And Lloyd. Lloyd who's in prison after being part of a tristate murder spree. The Dark Man breaks Lloyd out of jail eventually, and they head west. Oh yes, and we can't forget The Trashcan Man, who's a pyromaniac who starts turning refineries on Lake Michigan into giant bombs.

Anyway, survivors are all having dreams of both The Dark Man and Mother Abigail, so everyone starts moving West to Nebraska or Vegas. Mother Abigail is in Nebraska, and is other directed by G-d. Although G-d sends a vision to Mother Abigail, so everyone winds up in Boulder, where a rumor during the plague meant a large scale evacuation and the lack of humidity makes for a lack of rot.

Everyone has adventures getting cross country, picking up people as they go. Boulder tries to restart a government, Vegas is ruled with an iron fist by a psycho who's crucifying those who cross him. Nadine and Harold end up switching sides, cause issues, and four of the men end up walking from Boulder to Vegas. Then we get a few hundred pages after the climax of two people trying to get back to Boulder.

In any book this large, any reread is going to uncover things you missed on previous readings. Like, in modern parlance, Harold is essentially an Incel. Like the ending likely taking place somewhere other than the Earth of the rest of the book. (Mind you, if you wade through The Dark Tower, The Dark Man shows up quite a bit there, as well as in The Eyes of the Dragon, so this makes sense.)

Is this my favorite King? No, that still belongs to either It or The Waste Land. Is it good King? Yeah, because the pacing, despite the volume, keeps it going for the most part. Mind you, it's the hundred of so pages of story afted the Climax that keeps it from being downright stellar, but....