If I have any significant thoughts on this book, they will appear in the comment stream below…
My previous reviews of Stephen King’s work here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/stephen-king-the-dark-tower/ AND his collage here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/stephen-king/
But above all thanks to Stephen King: ‘Stephen King’: the spear-carrier, the walk-on, the walk-in, the do-over…someone I briefly met in 1983 in London when he signed my Futura paperback of CUJO. (Detta’s in the prompt-box).
— from my 2011 review of THE DARK TOWER: The Dark Tower, here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/the-dark-tower-the-dark-tower/
Re the first mention of Radar as Cujo in Fairy Tale.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW
CONTINUING MY AIDE MEMOIRE…
Page 70
“…and a thick hardcover tome titled ’The Origins of Fantasy and Its Place in the World Matrix: Jungian Perspective.’”
Page 109
Jack and the Beanstalk & Child Roland and the dark tower.
I am 75 and under current treatment by Enzalutamide for Prostate Cancer. First diagnosed in 2015, as my family and facebook friends know. Diagnosed when I was reading SK’s REVIVAL novel.
I think SK is around the same age as me. Is this also Howard Bowditch’s age? Is the engaging narrator (here affected by the wonder of the Beanstalk story) wielding a narration as spun by SK, and is he SK’s younger self?
Thinking aloud.
Believe it or not, I wrote above before I read page 116 !!
For Enzalutamide, read Lynparza?
Perhaps, it was inevitable I was meant to read this novel, just as I was meant to review REVIVAL in 2015? (https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/revival-by-stephen-king/)
“This is where your disbelief begins.”
Or, rather, the opposite, in my case!
Yet the giant roaches ‘give me the fantods.’
Bradbury’s sundial et al, via the shed. Rejuvenate Radar?
“…and fart, no more than a tweet, really.’ – p174
p186- a woman comes out to hang a fairy tale boot on a lone cottage’s washing line; she is exactly described as both beautiful and as disfigured as one of ‘my’ ai-collage images of recent weeks!
The Ha of Ha man.
P195
“Some gunslinger I turned out to be.”
(earlier) P177
See the second and more fulsome reference to ‘The Origins of Fantasy and Its Place in the World Matrix: Jungian Perspective.’ !!
p228
You know, this may be turning into a prophecy of an AI art world, now with a ‘googir’ or goose girl, with a scar for a missing mouth, and a facial blemish, but beautiful nevertheless, and who ventriloquises her speech through a horse!
Up to p300
Monarch butterflies, Lovecraft etc.
“There was no way I could know that for sure, but I did.”
Up to p317
“…a resounding fart that went on and on. It reminded me of the trombone break in my dad’s favorite instrumental, ‘Midnight in Moscow’.”
”Evil has fallen on this unlucky land.”
Up to p335
“When I saw such things in horror movies, I just laughed and hooted along with my friends. I wasn’t laughing now. I screamed.”
p354
“I knew the chances were slim, but you know what they say about hope: it’s the thing with feathers. It can fly even for those who are imprisoned. Maybe specially for them.”
After Emily Dickinson.
‘the only thing I knew about whole ones was that they didn’t grow gray’
The literary gestalt as goal?
31 is almost 32
Up to page 377
“Thirty-one was a prime number, divisible only by one and itself. Thirty-two, though . . . that was divisible all the way down.”
“— I don’t think butterflies bleed.”
Much collusion between Charlie the narrator and his spinner SK, with reference to a ‘ton of backstory’ and George R.R. Martin.
The first third of this book a seduction by SK to get his horror/realist readers to read the second two thirds with its Dark Tower vibes!
Genetics re the grays and the whole ones, racism touched on.
Up to p400
Characters named Iota and Jaya, also Alpha-dogs mentioned, in crazy Chapter 22.
Jaya is also this book’s art director!
It has just dawned on me that the chapter headings seem to form a shorthand aide-memoire of their own, akin to my notes above!
P405
“‘…in Lilimar and the suburbs that surround it.’ / Did he say suburbs or smallies? It came to the same thing.”
…as if Lilimar and Gallien were Lilliput and Gulliver??!
The concept of hit and miss words we have now learnt about?
P418
p453
“‘Oi!’ one of them cried. (I’m pretty sure it was oi.)”
Up to p470
A Kaleidoscope of Monarch Butterflies.
Fight or Flight Killer?
Who the fairy tale Prince, who the Coward, which the presents?
Up to p500
“. . . I think all worlds are magic. We just get used to it.”
When the two moons or sisters kiss, Gogmagog will come again from the Dark Well? Is this the return of Trump, I wonder? I hope King’s Prince self succeeds.
p534
“…but the real horror was this: it was beautiful.”
To end…
I say its name is Azathoth, not Gogmagog. The wrong name quashed it only temporarily? See what the name of the monster at the earth’s core is in ‘Nemonymous Night’ – a similar but quite different up and down world within the earth to which my heroes travel by various means.
Horror climax in ‘Fairy Tale’ is possibly King’s best ever, an ultra-Lovecraft ending (a soft name worthy of a happy ending) with indeed its further climax beyond that horror becoming maybe or maybe not happy.
Bowditch’s prostate in prostasis as a personal take…
King’s own personal take here is different. Or at least his Princely character’s take is different.
Up is down, down is up, an ingenious take in itself on how these fantasy worlds work in ‘Fairy Tale’. Take from it what you will.
A tontine as a cube root of forever or never.