Fairy Tale

I've never done this with a Stephen King book before: stopped halfway through and skipped to the end just to see how things were wound up.

I loved the opening. The first 200 pages or so were so good that I thought I was on to another winner. The chapters describing Charlie meeting Howard Bowditch and his dog Radar, becoming friends with both, dealing with his own father’s alcoholism, inheriting a house and discovering a passage to the secret fairy tale land are King at his absolute best. You get swept up in the story and the characters. Everything springs so vividly to life you think it can only get better when our hero and his dog reach the fantasy world below.

But it’s at this point that the pace begins to sag. And while it’s a truly odd and fantastic world our heroes traverse, it’s written in such detail that it all bogs down and fails to come to life. Instead of crisp and vivid descriptions, we get pages and paragraphs of text that end up draining any tension out of the story. I can’t tell whether SK lost interest and just hacked out the pages before giving them a cursory polish – or whether he was so in love with his fairy tale world he couldn’t stop describing it. He didn’t kill his darlings; he cherished and nurtured them. 

Whatever it was, I kept going for about 70 pages and then gave up.

Ho hum.