Stephen King is 75 years old, he already has the authority and size to create stories in which he writes about the famous stories of other famous writers. What used to be called “name check” is now called “easter egg” or, to put it a little further: “leap to the meta level”. He already honored his colleague JK Rowling in “Wolves of the Calla” from 2003, he used Harry Potter snitches as thrown weapons, and he honored George Lucas, he gave his people lightsabers.
One should be glad that we no longer live in the past, at least not in the 1980s, because then his German publisher might not have left the title of his new novel “Fairy Tale” in the original, but might have named it “Fantasy”. , because back then people were afraid that none of us could speak English. “Fairy Tale” is exactly what the German translation would say: a fairy tale. A fairy tale without a name of its own, because King enjoys incorporating so many references to fairy tale classics that not only his protagonist, 17-year-old Charlie Reade, smiles continuously about the supposed similarities between his world and the strange world, but also the author at times own story threatens to get lost.
There are quite a few fairy tales, films, series or novels that King pays homage to. This list of “Easter Eggs” is truly incomplete: “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Game of Thrones”, “Masters of the Universe”, “Hansel and Gretel”, “The Three Little Pigs”, “The Little Mermaid”, “The Bride of the Prince”, “The Wizard of Oz”, “The Neverending Story”, “Rapunzel”, “Rumpelstiltskin”, but also modern things like Joe Dante’s film “The Hole”, which is about a malicious power that overpowers a hole in the shed threatens to spill over into our world.
The last word in fairy tales?
Did someone ask for this book by Stephen King? Was he trying to place himself in the canon of great storytellers? He wouldn’t have needed that, he’s already written a few fairy tales, both good and bad, they just can’t always be recognized as such – they’re stories with a hero’s journey, that’s all it really needs. “Doctor Sleep”, “It”, but also the obvious East-to-West quests, like “The Talisman”. Fairy Tale is what its title suggests: a blank space to be filled by other stories evoked by the horror grandmaster in this book. For King fanatics, Fairy Tale might be more like the last word in fairy tales. So big that it no longer needs a descriptive name.
Fairy Tale is a White Savior story about a teenager from planet Earth tasked with doing what the denizens of the undiscovered world called Empis failed to do, defeating a Cthulhu-like creature that has enslaved the land and placed a curse on its denizens , which leads to deformities. Young Charlie climbs through the shed hole into this universe inhabited by all sorts of zombie knights and oversized animals.
Basically a nice American gimmick by King that he only sent his protagonist to Empis for this heroic story so that he could find a wheel hidden there – because Charlie has his terminally ill, decrepit dog with him, which rotates counterclockwise on the device, so counterclockwise the time is supposed to run and thus decreases by one year per revolution. “I just wanted to get my dog and go home,” says Charlie. In its touching sensitivity it has something of the “Waltons”.
Here King pays tribute, he writes it himself, to his idol Ray Bradbury. We know the enchanted merry-go-round from Evil Walks Softly, and once, at least for once in this novel, King enchants us with his imagination; the most fascinating are mind games in which we devote ourselves to the question of what actually became of the legendary machines in famous novels. In Bradbury’s book the merry-go-round burns down, here a fictional character ponders whether the sci-fi king Bradbury might not have sat down on such a merry-go-round himself – and tried it out: “What Bradbury … by the way he sure has … oh forget it , but memorize it.” That makes you curious. Ray must have got his many brilliant ideas from somewhere!
In such moments of the merging of fairy tales with their authors, the question of whether the richness of imaginary stories is not based on actual experiences, “Fairy Tale” also becomes a strong story. In Bradbury’s novel, one of the two main characters, little Jim, almost never gets off the merry-go-round, getting a year older with every lap until he’d be an old man if the thing wasn’t stopped. Jim is rescued, but King now implicates the boy’s continued existence with malicious consequences – he becomes incapacitated and bipolar. Retelling a classic, that’s something King can do.
Trump, the climate
But Stephen King has been pursuing a political mission for the past 20 years, spurred on by the presidency of George W. Bush and massively reinforced by Trump (who has been mentioned in almost all of his books since 2016), which he tries to incorporate into his texts. The Republicans, but also the Far Eastern Islamists – King always manages to come back to them. Empis’ autocrats are compared to “Islamic State,” and the end of the novel reads like a speech at the UN. Empis is saved, and its savior Charlie decides to close the portal to this beautiful world forever so that it will not be exploited by accidentally discovering Earth people: “After everything we have done to so many indigenous peoples and the climate, I have to agree with you there,” says his father, like King a dry alcoholic. The climate, of course. The climate has to be in the book.
Because our world, as Charlie knows, is no more respectable than Empis, not even at the time when “air killers” and “after-soldiers” terrorized the mistreated people there. After all, our planet has nuclear weapons, “and if it’s not black magic, I don’t know what is.” The residents of Empis admire Charlie’s clothes, which he knows were only sewn in a Swaetshop in Vietnam – “behind appearances hide…” etc. At the end of his coming-of-age (now the obvious term) hero’s journey, Charlie not only got his dog fit again, but also lost his virginity. “Fairy Tale” is therefore also a story about the annoying congestion of juices in puberty. Where else is a 17-year-old supposed to have the strength to pull off a bull’s neck in Squid Game-like arena-fighting situations (we like each other, we prisoners are a team, but we have to kill each other until there’s only one left). make?
King repeats himself, and repetition is different from self-references, which could be so clever. In the final confrontation with the “fly killer”, King, as so often before, misses the chance for an effective fight, one that will be decided by a real plan. But as in “Talisman” or “It”, the monster is expelled solely by willpower, sudden energy budgets or incantations that this entity from another dimension does not know. That’s way too convenient for the narrative. The salutations from his “Dark Tower” saga (“there are other worlds than this one”) are now so inflationary in the overall work that they don’t seem like links, but like running gags.
After all, unlike in “Black House” or “The Dark Tower”, King allows us the experience of a real happy ending, not one with a false bottom. At the end of the day, it’s an “And if they didn’t die…” story. And, at least, King can still write thousands of pages (in the German translation).
A look at King’s works over the last ten years. He has published an incredible 17 books since 2012. The older gentleman’s number of bars is of course phenomenal and only slightly more equalized than at the beginning of his career. Of these 17 works, three novels are outstanding (“Mr. Mercedes”, “Revival”, “Billy Summers”) and two are very good (“The Wind Through The Keyhole”, “Elevation”). So a little less than a third of these books are made for King canon. Is that a good quote? Probably yes. But some of King’s posts on Twitter are now more entertaining than the novels.
(heyne)
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