Bookrate

This book made it to #48 in our Top 101 2023! Every year we ask our Booklovers to vote for their favourite book. From that, we share the Top 101 winners for everyone to enjoy. Discover the rest of the books that made it into our Top 101 list.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 their 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. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and his 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 about another world than ours, in which good is pitted against overwhelming evil, and a heroic boy - and his dog - must lead the battle."I always have high hopes for a new Stephen King, and thankfully I was not disappointed in his newest epic novel. As the name suggests, this is a modern fairy tale, but don't go into this expecting Disney! Think of the original bloody Grimm's Tales, or Lovecraft, but set in modern-day America... until it isn't. Oh, and there's a dog; while Cujo rates a mention, Radar couldn't be further from a monster, and will steal your heart. King is a master fisherman and will hook you with just enough bait to keep going back for more, making it nigh impossible to put this book down." Kat, Dymocks Camberwell