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Fairy Tale
By Stephen King
Scribner, 9781668002179, September 2022, 608pp.

The Short of It:

My prediction is that lovers of fantasy will absolutely love Fairy Tale. However, that is not me.

The Rest of It:

Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher—for that world or ours. ` Indiebound

Although the fantasy elements didn’t win me over, the main character and dog did. Charlie Reade is probably right up there with my favorite King characters. And Radar, his aging canine sidekick, made me like this book even though the fantasy parts didn’t score any points with me. The one thing that is always true, is that King is a heck of a storyteller. He pulls me right in and I keep drinking his Kool-aid. Willingly.

While Charlie is caring for his injured neighbor, he stumbles across a mysterious shed, hears some strange sounds and becomes all too aware of how Radar reacts to those noises. Who is in that shed? What is in that shed and what could his neighbor Mr. Bowditch be hiding?

I may be the only reader to notice this but I found some similarities between Fairy Tale and Murakami’s Killing Commendatore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. At one point Fairy Tale felt very familiar to me and yet it wasn’t at all what I expected from King. It was at this point that I began to skim a little. It’s a chunk of a book and it felt a tad repetitive but I also wanted to finish it.

Have you read it? What are your thoughts? King fans might be surprised by this one but fans of fantasy might find a new favorite in Fairy Tale.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

Damnation Spring
By Ash Davidson
Scribner, 9781982144401, August 2021, 464pp.

The Short of It:

Slow build, but worth it in the end.

The Rest of It:

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened. ~ Indiebound

Damnation Spring is about a lot of things. That is why the story is sticking with me even though I finished it a few days ago. Colleen and Rich don’t have the perfect marriage but there’s love there, especially for their young son Chub. But after eight miscarriages, Colleen wants nothing more than to carry a baby to term but there’s a problem. The spray used to control the growth in their logging community is poisoning their water. Colleen, an amateur midwife to the other women in the community has seen the proof of it more than she cares to admit. Babies, born with half a brain, and now her own sister is pregnant.

Colleen’s determination at finding the cause for her miscarriages creates problems for Rich and his logging team. He wants to ignore it but when he looks at his son Chub, he also doesn’t want to endanger his life or Colleen’s. Plus, he has a financial stake in all of this because he purchased a large part of the land, with the hopes to sell the timber but there are challenges there too. Roads, not owned by him. You might own the timber but you can’t get it out if the roads aren’t available to you.

This was a rich, complicated story about people trying to survive. I loved the complexity of the characters. There is a rawness to the story too. The beauty of the timber, the destruction of the forest, the poisoning of the water and everything around it trying so hard to survive. It was very good and I didn’t notice its length at nearly 500 pages.

Recommend.

Source: Review copy provide by the publisher.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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