Blurbos Rating (4.7)
There is some truly amazing world building here from King. The Fairy Tale universe is an masterful blend of horror and fantasy, with an incredibly written narrator that I cared about from the beginning, alongside a supporting cast full of memorable characters, both good and evil.
The novel is very well paced, has great suspension builds and twists, and has a satisfying ending. If you are a fan of Stephen King or dark fantasy, then I highly recommend Fairy Tale.
Highlights
Dad said the drinking was because he still missed Janey so much. And Mr. Franklin said, “If booze would bring her back, I’d say fine. But it won’t, and how would she feel if she saw how you and your boy are living now?”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 13 | Location 207-209 2022-12-20 00:23:31
In AA, you can choose to believe what you want.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 14 | Location 222-222 2022-12-20 00:24:49
There were terrible things in my future—I’ll tell you about them eventually—but none of the terrible things I had lain awake imagining ever came to pass.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 16 | Location 261-262 2022-12-20 00:29:14
You have to keep in mind that high school kids—no matter how big the boys, no matter how beautiful the girls—are still mostly children inside.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 17 | Location 269-270 2022-12-20 00:29:45
“Sure,” Bertie said. “Monster dog. Like Cujo in that movie. Riii-ight.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 19 | Location 301-301 2022-12-20 00:32:55
“A brave man helps. A coward just gives presents.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 43 | Location 663-664 2022-12-20 23:16:13
Winners never quit and quitters never win!” “Then call me a loser,” I said.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 46 | Location 712-713 2022-12-20 23:19:51
From behind the door came a scratching, followed by a weird chittering noise that stood up the hair on the back of my neck. Not an animal sound. I’d never heard anything exactly like it.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 47 | Location 725-726 2022-12-20 23:21:22
I had an idea that whatever was in the shed might be the big secret he wanted to tell me about, but I was wrong. I didn’t find out about the shed until later.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 86 | Location 1315-1316 2022-12-22 23:37:46
“Bad idea,” I said. Without opening them, he said, “The universe is full of them.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 106 | Location 1617-1618 2022-12-23 23:33:08
“The fascination of gold is something quite apart from its cash value.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 128 | Location 1917-1917 2022-12-26 00:46:25
I didn’t know what to say, but Mr. Bowditch did, and Radar was his dog. “Good enough.” Then he added something I didn’t understand then but do now: “Long enough. Maybe.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 132 | Location 1980-1982 2022-12-27 23:38:12
Are you coming after school?” “No, I thought I’d go out to Stantonville and see if I could score some crack.” “The humor of young people is crude
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 135 | Location 2031-2032 2022-12-27 23:42:14
A simple woodcutter, he’d said to me not all that long ago. The fairy tales are full of them.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 149 | Location 2242-2243 2022-12-28 23:29:28
Howard Adrian Bowditch was laid to rest just two days later, on Thursday the twenty-sixth of September, 2013.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 150 | Location 2255-2256 2022-12-28 23:30:24
I was looking at Mr. Bowditch’s version of Jack’s beanstalk. It went down instead of up, but there was gold at the other end. I was sure of it.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 168 | Location 2517-2518 2022-12-29 23:14:15
I was insubstantial, and I remember thinking that we all are, really, just ghosts on the face of the earth trying to believe we have weight and a place in the world.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 171 | Location 2586-2588 2022-12-29 23:20:27
The sundial is the secret of my longevity, and I paid a price. You must not get on it yourself, but if you were to put Radar on it—
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 173 | Location 2624-2625 2022-12-29 23:23:52
Rades seemed surprised that we were getting up in the dark,
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 217 | Location 3272-3272 2022-12-31 12:56:51
“What is this land? What do you call it?” They looked at me as if I had a screw loose—a phrase I probably wouldn’t be able to say—and then the man replied. “Tis Empis.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 243 | Location 3679-3681 2023-01-01 08:39:41
I clipped Radar’s leash to her collar. I didn’t want her chasing any giant rabbits into the woods and meeting this world’s version of a Game of Thrones direwolf.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 249 | Location 3757-3759 2023-01-01 09:00:33
Here is something I learned in Empis: good people shine brighter in dark times.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 251 | Location 3784-3784 2023-01-01 09:02:37
Help her, too, I thought. Help Dora, too.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 251 | Location 3784-3785 2023-01-01 09:02:43
But when you’re a kid it’s easy to believe that you will be the exception, the one who wins through and gets the laurels.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 254 | Location 3835-3836 2023-01-01 10:04:30
it wasn’t until after he was gone that it occurred to me that I really should have made him drop the knife and leave it behind.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 260 | Location 3930-3931 2023-01-01 10:12:12
Given a choice between being blind and having the gray, I’d choose blindness every time. I have adjusted quite well. Thanks to Adrian, I even have make-believe stories to read. The gray is slow death. It becomes harder and harder to breathe. The face is swallowed up by useless flesh. The body closes up.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 268 | Location 4062-4064 2023-01-01 11:43:07
And things I’ve seen over here are like those stories.” “As are things where you came from, I’m sure. It’s all stories, Prince Charlie.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 268 | Location 4070-4072 2023-01-01 11:43:54
“Eight of us escaped death in the city, and our blood protects us from the gray, but another curse followed us. Can you guess?” I could. “Each of you lost one of your senses?” “Yes.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 269 | Location 4084-4086 2023-01-01 11:45:14
But wishes are like beauty—vain things.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 272 | Location 4132-4133 2023-01-01 12:11:14
Woody’s was a house of bricks, Claudia’s a house of sticks. If there was another royal relative who’d been living in a house of straw, I guessed he or she had been gobbled up long ago.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 283 | Location 4288-4289 2023-01-01 12:28:59
I didn’t exactly sound like myself, and not for the first time. I sounded more like a character in a book or a movie. I almost expected to hear myself say My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 316 | Location 4789-4791 2023-01-01 19:47:13
It took me to the right of the pretty little pool. There was no need to stop and peer into it from between two of the palms, not when what I’d come for was so close, but I did. And as terrible as what I saw there was, I’m glad. It changed everything, although it would be a long time before I fully understood the crucial importance of that moment.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 325 | Location 4916-4918 2023-01-01 20:05:37
Sometimes we look because we have to remember. Sometimes the most horrible things are what give us strength.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 325 | Location 4918-4919 2023-01-01 20:05:46
giants never sing when you want them to.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 331 | Location 5014-5015 2023-01-01 21:09:26
“Hello, savior of insecks! Are you still an irritable boy, or are you now a scared boy? One who wants to run home to mommy but can’t find his way?” This was followed by a squall of laughter. “I cleaned away your marks with lye, didn’t
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 335 | Location 5087-5089 2023-01-01 21:15:05
I didn’t know why, but an idea had begun to glimmer. Thirty-one was a prime number, divisible only by one and itself. Thirty-two, though… that was divisible all the way down.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 371 | Location 5617-5619 2023-01-03 19:28:01
It’s their blood, Charlie, that berdecks us from the gray. Who knows what brince or courtier or even the king hisself laid down with my grammy, or my great-grammy, or even my mammy? And here I am without a spotch of gray on me.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 378 | Location 5724-5726 2023-01-03 19:36:57
I’m tall when I’m young, short when I’m old. What am I?” “A candle,” Jackah said. “Everyone knows that one, dummy.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 384 | Location 5820-5821 2023-01-03 20:52:06
I think tempus est umbra in mente is a better one. Roughly translated, it means time is a shadow in the mind.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 412 | Location 6222-6223 2023-01-04 20:20:06
You get used to the amazing, that’s all. Mermaids and IMAX, giants and cell phones. If it’s in your world, you go with it. It’s wonderful, right? Only look at it another way, and it’s sort of awful. Think Gogmagog is scary? Our world is sitting on a potentially world-ending supply of nuclear weapons, and if that’s not black magic, I don’t know what is.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 414 | Location 6264-6267 2023-01-04 20:24:47
I think in such a terrible situation, a person would either remember everything… or nothing at all.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 427 | Location 6469-6470 2023-01-05 03:45:11
I thought, I don’t want to be a Disney prince. To hell with that. If I have to be a prince, I want to be a dark one.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 438 | Location 6607-6608 2023-01-05 04:08:36
There’s a dark well in everyone, I think, and it never goes dry. But you drink from it at your peril. That water is poison.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 446 | Location 6745-6746 2023-01-05 04:32:19
I’m sure that the hero of an action movie would have managed a smart comeback, but I looked into that wide face and those black eyes and couldn’t think of a fucking thing.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 447 | Location 6756-6757 2023-01-05 04:33:17
He’s rooting out the few who are immune to the curse, and he would kill every monarch butterfly if he could. He wants no flowers in his garden, only weeds.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 490 | Location 7379-7381 2023-01-07 21:19:00
“I think there’s always a reason for love, but sometimes hate just is. A kind of free-floating evil.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 490 | Location 7385-7386 2023-01-07 21:19:39
He calls himself Flight Killer now, but you’ve seen for yourself that thousands, no, MILLIONS, of the monarchs still live.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 493 | Location 7426-7427 2023-01-07 21:20:43
The red cricket wasn’t a snab, but the Snab. Claudia called him the king of the small world. I assumed then that she meant insects (It’s just a damn inseck, Peterkin had said), but later I came to believe that the Snab might be the ruler of many of the creatures I’d seen.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 494 | Location 7441-7443 2023-01-07 21:21:17
Of course I hadn’t been; my mind had been filled with my own thoughts… just as the minds of many who passed Elsa didn’t hear her songs because they were too busy to listen. That much is true about songs (and many stories) even in my own world. They speak mind to mind, but only if you listen.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 494 | Location 7450-7452 2023-01-07 23:05:51
it’s the stories of our childhood that make the deepest impressions and last the longest.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 495 | Location 7457-7458 2023-01-07 23:06:22
There’s something in you that’s as hard as old paint.” And dark, I thought. My own dark well, of which I’d do well to beware.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 498 | Location 7509-7511 2023-01-07 23:10:54
I think all worlds are magic. We just get used to it.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 499 | Location 7523-7524 2023-01-07 23:11:57
I thought of asking Leah if Mr. Bowditch had installed the magic lights and the generator to power them, but I already knew. Cowards bring presents.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 529 | Location 7952-7953 2023-01-08 14:14:51
In the whole history of the world—all the worlds—not knowing never changed a single mistake.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 531 | Location 7991-7992 2023-01-08 14:19:22
Iota spoke one last time, as Falada had spoken, and the Snab. “The Queen of Empis will do her duty. This I swear.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 535 | Location 8059-8060 2023-01-08 14:28:57
Then I started to smell something, very faintly. “High gods,” Eris said, and laughed. There was nothing cheerful about it. “The wheel turns and here we are, back where we came from.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 538 | Location 8077-8078 2023-01-08 14:31:07
I had read about PTSD, but reading about something and understanding it are very different things.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 538 | Location 8083-8084 2023-01-08 14:31:47
Here’s another fairy tale, I thought. One meant for adults instead of children. No big bad wolf, no giant, no Rumpelstiltskin. That’s a version of Cthulhu over those arches, and is that what Gogmagog is? High priest of the Elder Gods, dreaming his malevolent dreams in the ruins of R’lyeh? Is that what Elden wants to ask another favor of?
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 545 | Location 8184-8186 2023-01-08 14:45:22
This can’t be, I thought, then realized that yes, it could. Hadn’t I already come out into another world, after descending another set of stairs? I had come out in the world of Empis. Now here was a third.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 549 | Location 8243-8244 2023-01-08 14:53:11
He might have been promised gold, or women, an estate in the countryside, or all three. What he’d gotten was death.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 550 | Location 8265-8266 2023-01-08 14:56:15
realized that whatever the thing in the well might be, it wasn’t Cthulhu. Elden was this world’s Cthulhu, as surely as Dora was the old woman who lived in a shoe and Leah was the goose girl.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 552 | Location 8297-8299 2023-01-08 15:01:15
and I realized that whatever the thing in the well might be, it wasn’t Cthulhu. Elden was this world’s Cthulhu, as surely as Dora was the old woman who lived in a shoe and Leah was the goose girl.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 552 | Location 8297-8299 2023-01-08 22:41:20
I realized that whatever the thing in the well might be, it wasn’t Cthulhu. Elden was this world’s Cthulhu, as surely as Dora was the old woman who lived in a shoe and Leah was the goose girl.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 552 | Location 8297-8299 2023-01-08 22:41:29
He was turning into Cthulhu before my eyes, lord of the old gods, a nightmare fairy tale come to life. But the real monster was below. Soon it would emerge. Gogmagog.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 552 | Location 8305-8307 2023-01-08 15:01:47
If I was dying—and it certainly felt like I was—I wanted to do it outside, breathing free air.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 562 | Location 8463-8463 2023-01-08 22:54:04
“We needed someone to save us. We got you. Better than nothing, I suppose.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 566 | Location 8503-8504 2023-01-08 22:56:52
But men who ride the sundial, even a single turn, are sterile. And women are barren. The sundial gives life, but it also takes it away.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 575 | Location 8638-8639 2023-01-09 23:13:21
“When there is love, scars are as pretty as dimples. I love you, Leah.”
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 577 | Location 8676-8676 2023-01-09 23:16:06
shame is like laughter. And inspiration. It doesn’t knock.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 595 | Location 8902-8903 2023-01-09 23:32:14
“You might as well ask who made the world.” Ours, and others. I’m sure there are others, maybe as many as there are stars in the sky. We sense them. They funnel down to us in all the old stories.
<Fairy Tale>(King, Stephen) Highlight on page 595 | Location 8914-8916 2023-01-09 23:33:31