Books: Faerie Tale By Raymond E. Feist (1988)

“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.