Reading Report: Late March 2023

I finished two books this week.

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls, C-: I gave this book a low grade not because it’s unreadable. The prose flows smoothly, making the book an easy read in that respect, and it’s the only reason the grade is as high as it is. The story is the problem. Quick synopsis: a boy in the Ozarks trains his two dogs to hunt raccoons; violence and death ensue. This story is everything that’s gross about human nature. Plus, heads-up: it’s about dogs, so you already know how it’s going to end. The only bright side is that by then you may have hardened your heart enough not to care. My sympathies to every schoolchild forced to read this trauma-inducing tale of selfishness, obsessive stupidity, religious indoctrination, environmental destruction, violence, and animal cruelty.

Fairy Tale by Stephen King, B-: I like Stephen King’s everyman writing style and his passion for the “what if,” which is why I read his books, even though I don’t particularly like horror novels. Fairy Tale is not his best effort. The protagonist is Charlie, a 17-year-old boy who acts more like a 70-year-old man and consequently never rings true. After a painfully slow start during which he saves an old man’s life and falls in love with the guy’s elderly dog, Charlie travels, via a stairway hidden under the old man’s shed, to a fairy-tale land called Empis. His goal is to get to a magic wheel that, like Bradbury’s famous merry-go-round, has the power to make a person (or in this case, a dog) young again. The wheel is located in the middle of a city that has been overrun by evil, so the journey is a perilous one. King draws parallels between his story and the collective fantasy/fairy tales of our culture–stories by authors such as Bradbury, L. Frank Baum, and Lovecraft, as well as older tales, like “Rumpelstiltskin” and “The Goose Girl”–but I wasn’t feeling it. Empis is a horrible, cursed land, where the people are turning gray, deformed, losing their powers of speech, sight, and hearing. I felt no joy in being there, only relief in leaving. There were enough interesting things in the story to eke out a B-level grade, but overall I didn’t like it, and I will be putting the book in the donation pile.