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Fairy Tale: A Novel - Hardcover

King, Stephen

 
9781668002179: Fairy Tale: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668002175 ISBN 13: 9781668002179
Verlag: Scribner, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Master storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this #1 New York Times bestselling and spellbinding novel about a young man 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.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a horrific accident when he was seven, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from that shed.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes Never Flinch, the short story collection You Like It Darker (a New York Times Book Review top ten horror book of 2024), Holly (a New York Times Notable Book of 2023), Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel 11/22/63 was named a top ten book of 2011 by The New York Times Book Review and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works The Dark Tower, It, Pet Sematary, Doctor Sleep, and Firestarter are the basis for major motion pictures, with It now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

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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.

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself―and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

King’s storytelling in Fairy Tale soars. This is a magnificent and terrifying tale in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy―and his dog―must lead the battle.

Early in the Pandemic, King asked himself: “What could you write that would make you happy?”

“As if my imagination had been waiting for the question to be asked, I saw a vast deserted city―deserted but alive. I saw the empty streets, the haunted buildings, a gargoyle head lying overturned in the street. I saw smashed statues (of what I didn’t know, but I eventually found out). I saw a huge, sprawling palace with glass towers so high their tips pierced the clouds. Those images released the story I wanted to tell.”

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: The Goddam Bridge. The Miracle. The Howling. CHAPTER ONE The Goddam Bridge. The Miracle. The Howling. 1
I’m sure I can tell this story. I’m also sure no one will believe it. That’s fine with me. Telling it will be enough. My problem—and I’m sure many writers have it, not just newbies like me—is deciding where to start.

My first thought was with the shed, because that’s where my adventures really began, but then I realized I would have to tell about Mr. Bowditch first, and how we became close. Only that never would have happened except for the miracle that happened to my father. A very ordinary miracle you could say, one that’s happened to many thousands of men and women since 1935, but it seemed like a miracle to a kid.

Only that isn’t the right place, either, because I don’t think my father would have needed a miracle if it hadn’t been for that goddamned bridge. So that’s where I need to start, with the goddamned Sycamore Street Bridge. And now, thinking of those things, I see a clear thread leading up through the years to Mr. Bowditch and the padlocked shed behind his ramshackle old Victorian.

But a thread is easy to break. So not a thread but a chain. A strong one. And I was the kid with the shackle clamped around his wrist.
2
The Little Rumple River runs through the north end of Sentry’s Rest (known to the locals as Sentry), and until the year 1996, the year I was born, it was spanned by a wooden bridge. That was the year the state inspectors from the Department of Highway Transportation looked it over and deemed it unsafe. People in our part of Sentry had known that since ’82, my father said. The bridge was posted for ten thousand pounds, but townies with a fully loaded pickup truck mostly steered clear of it, opting for the turnpike extension, which was an annoying and time-consuming detour. My dad said you could feel the planks shiver and shake and rumble under you even in a car. It was dangerous, the state inspectors were right about that, but here’s the irony: if the old wooden bridge had never been replaced by one made of steel, my mother might still be alive.

The Little Rumple really is little, and putting up the new bridge didn’t take long. The wooden span was demolished and the new one was opened to traffic in April of 1997.

“The mayor cut a ribbon, Father Coughlin blessed the goddam thing, and that was that,” my father said one night. He was pretty drunk at the time. “Wasn’t much of a blessing for us, Charlie, was it?”

It was named the Frank Ellsworth Bridge, after a hometown hero who died in Vietnam, but the locals just called it the Sycamore Street Bridge. Sycamore Street was paved nice and smooth on both sides, but the bridge deck—one hundred and forty-two feet long—was steel grating that made a humming sound when cars went over it and a rumble when trucks used it—which they could do, because the bridge was now rated at sixty thousand pounds. Not big enough for a loaded semi, but long-haulers never used Sycamore Street, anyway.

There was talk every year in the town council about paving the deck and adding at least one sidewalk, but every year it seemed like there were other places where the money was needed more urgently. I don’t think a sidewalk would have saved my mother, but paving might have. There’s no way to know, is there?

That goddam bridge.
3
We lived halfway up the long length of Sycamore Street Hill, about a quarter of a mile from the bridge. There was a little gas-and-convenience store on the other side called Zip Mart. It sold all the usual stuff, from motor oil to Wonder Bread to Little Debbie cakes, but it also sold fried chicken made by the proprietor, Mr. Eliades (known to the neighborhood as Mr. Zippy). That chicken was exactly what the sign in the window said: THE BEST IN THE LAND. I can still remember how tasty it was, but I never ate a single piece after my mom died. I would have gagged it up if I tried.

One Saturday in November of 2003—the town council still discussing paving the bridge and still deciding it could wait another year—my mother told us she was going to walk down to the Zippy and get us fried chicken for dinner. My father and I were watching a college football game.

“You should take the car,” Dad said. “It’s going to rain.”

“I need the exercise,” Mom said, “but I’ll wear my Little Red Riding Hood raincoat.”

And that’s what she was wearing the last time I saw her. The hood wasn’t up because it wasn’t raining yet, so her hair was spilling over her shoulders. I was seven years old, and thought my mother had the world’s most beautiful red hair. She saw me looking at her through the window and waved. I waved back, then turned my attention to the TV, where LSU was driving. I wish I had looked longer, but I don’t blame myself. You never know where the trapdoors are in your life, do you?

It wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t Dad’s fault, although I know he blamed himself, thought if only I’d gotten up off my dead ass and given her a ride to the damn store. It probably wasn’t the fault of the man in the plumbing truck, either. The cops said he was sober, and he swore he was keeping to the speed limit, which was 25 in our residential zone. Dad said that even if that were true, the man must have taken his eyes off the road, if only for a few seconds. Dad was probably right about that. He was an insurance claims adjuster, and he told me once that the only pure accident he ever heard of was a man in Arizona who was killed when a meteor hit him in the head.

“There’s always someone at fault,” Dad said. “Which is not the same as blame.”

“Do you blame the man who hit Mom?” I asked.

He thought about it. Raised his glass to his lips and drank. This was six or eight months after Mom died, and he’d pretty much given up on beer. By then he was strictly a Gilbey’s man.

“I try not to. And mostly I can do that unless I wake up at two in the morning with nobody in the bed but me. Then I blame him.”
4
Mom walked down the hill. There was a sign where the sidewalk ended. She walked past the sign and crossed the bridge. By then it was getting dark and starting to drizzle. She went into the store, and Irina Eliades (of course known as Mrs. Zippy) told her more chicken was coming out in three minutes, five at the most. Somewhere on Pine Street, not far from our house, the plumber had just finished his last job of that Saturday and was putting his toolbox in the back of his panel van.

The chicken came out, hot and crispy and golden. Mrs. Zippy boxed up an eight-piece and gave Mom an extra wing to eat on her walk home. Mom thanked her, paid, and stopped to look at the magazine rack. If she hadn’t done that, she might have made it all the way across the bridge—who knows? The plumber’s van must have been turning onto Sycamore Street and starting down the mile-long hill while Mom was checking out the latest issue of People.

She put it back, opened the door, and spoke to Mrs. Zippy over her shoulder: “Have a nice night.” She might have cried out when she saw the van was going to hit her, and God knows what she might have been thinking, but those were the last words she ever spoke. She went out. The rain was coming down cold and steady by then, silvery lines in the glow of the one streetlight on the Zip Mart side of the bridge.

Munching on her chicken wing, my mother walked onto the steel deck. Headlights picked her out and threw her shadow long...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668002175
ISBN 13 
9781668002179
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
608
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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