“Phil Hastings and his family
have just moved back to his hometown for some much needed peace and quiet from
the Hollywood scene. As Phil's twins, Sean and Patrick, soon discover, there is
more to their new home than was expected. Gloria, their mother, senses
something, but simply dismisses her concern as stress from their recent move.
Gabbie, their older half-sister, meets the man of her dreams, but also is
tempted by other men. Deep in the woods, The Bad Thing and his Master are ready
to break free of the centuries-old compact made to keep the Faerie world and
the Human world at peace. Only through believing the insane and impossible can
Sean and Patrick save both worlds from colliding again.
There are
a lot of familiar themes here that make the book worth reading, especially the
oft-told story of your average –but very, very rich- white family moving into a
haunted house, and it’s take on possession, again, seen in multiple horror
stories, and uses (to certain extent Midsummer’s Night and All-Hallow’s Eve as
a template as well) but I found the first half of the book clunky, as if Feist
could not figure out how he was going get all his characters going in the right
direction. There is, as well, a weird and creepy-to-the-max rape fantasy
sequence, with Gabbie sort of wanting it take place. It strikes me that Feist,
in the mid-1980s when this was sort of acceptable and not questioned by his
editors, gave away his own dark psyche here. And then afterwards, no one seems
to care if there could be a crazed rapist hiding in the woods.
Still,
Feist replaced a lot of typical horror tropes and meshed them with ancient
myths of faerie folklore and changelings. Here the book is better, but is
rather dense in research. I felt at times I was reading a book on myths than a
fiction tale about a house and the land it sits on being the crossroad between the
real world and faerie one. So the mythology is really intriguing and vastly
different from what you see in this sub-genre.
It might
not be fair to compare Feist’s only dark fantasy novel to someone like Ray
Bradbury, but all of Bradbury’s work seemly has stood the test of time. Here,
in Faerie Tale, we get a late 1980s look at writer in his early 40s who
probably read Bradbury (and borrowed heavily from Stephen King -the hero kids
trope) but took the 80s excess of violence and sexuality and added it to his
tales, where Bradbury’s dark fantasy tales, in both short story and novel
formats, can be read decades later. Faerie Tale has just aged badly, and I have
matured since those halcyon days of reading every fantasy novel released in the
80s and 90s.
Also, I think
I originally read this book back when it was released in 1988, though now after
reading it, I’m uncertain I did. I know I had a copy of it, but a lot of serial
readers know that their TBR piles never seem to go down and some titles spend
years in it before being read or donated eventually down the line due to
various circumstances< Still, Faerie Tale remains Feist’s only stand-alone
title. I first encountered him is the mid-80s, when his 1982 novel, Magician was released in paperback in
1985. The book is set in a Dungeons
& Dragons–style fantasy world called Midkemia, originally
invented by Feist and his friends during college. The story follows the early
life of friends Pug and Tomas as their world is overtaken by war against alien
invaders who appear via portals. For some reason, Magician was separated
into two volumes for the United States market and published as: Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master (though the 1992
tenth anniversary release in hardcover returned it to its proper one volume
tale). Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon finished out
what turned out to be the early arc of Pug and Tomas. It was after was Faerie
Tale, that Feist returned Midkemia and write (sometimes with other
authors) 27 more volumes set in that universe, ending it in 2013. Five years
later, starting in 2018 and concluding in 2022, Feist published the Firemane
series.
I’m unsure
why exactly I never followed through in reading other books in the Riftwar series, but I sense a lot had
to do with other fantasy writers and tales that hit the bookshelves in that
decade I was reading them. I knew then –as I do today- that there is a lot of
stuff to read and devoting 30 years to the Riftwar
series, the nearly half century to Xanth
series, or the Robert Jordan series, or Shannara
series was going to prevent me from reading others.
I’ve said
it before, these fantasy novels should be no more than three to five volumes
–maybe six. After that the original audience has begun to move on to other
things. You may get a cadre of people who will read every book in the coming
years, but it’s a lot to expect. It’s a huge commitment once readers start
having families and homes and working horrible hours. Keep it simple, keep it
short (in both volumes and pages), I say.
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