UK Edition, 608 pages
English language
Published June 7, 2023 by Hodder & Stoughton.
WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE OF HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But 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.
When Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe - inside the shed is a portal to another world. 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.
An ode to the fairy tales we've all heard, very nicely written. The characters are sympathetic and the plot moves along at a steady, engaging pace. I'd recommend it.
I think that King went out on a huge limb here... and boy am I glad he did. This story, like the Shining, It, and the Institute before it, show the magnificent theme of "kid power" that Stephen is so good at. charlie Reade was no exception. I think that if he were a real person, I would want to get to know him, and I would probably hang out with him on a regular basis. Either way, if you want a book that's emotional as it is rivetting, then King does it again. It does have some of his normal horror, but this one gives the reader a bit of a break from that, where we see the more fantastical side of this wonderful and legendary author.
