Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support.

Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. In this parallel universe, where two moons race across the sky, and the grand towers of a sprawling palace pierce the clouds, there are exiled princesses and princes who suffer horrific punishments there are dungeons there are games in which men and women must fight each other to the death for the amusement of the “Fair One.” And there is a magic sundial that can turn back time.Ī story as old as myth, and as startling and iconic as the rest of King’s work, Fairy Tale is about an ordinary guy forced into the hero’s role by circumstance, and it is both spectacularly suspenseful and satisfying. Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie the house, a massive amount of gold, a cassette tape telling a story that is impossible to believe, and a responsibility far too massive for a boy to shoulder.īecause within the shed is a portal to another world-one whose denizens are in peril and whose monstrous leaders may destroy their own world, and ours. In the backyard is a locked shed from which strange sounds emerge, as if some creature is trying to escape. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. Charlie learned how to take care of himself-and his dad. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes deep into the 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.Ĭharlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student.

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