56 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingFairy Tale
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “First Night. Now You Know Jack. A Simple Woodcutter. Therapy. My Father’s Visit. Lynparza. Mr. Bowditch Makes a Promise.”
Mr. Bowditch returns home, and Charlie spends his first night at 1 Sycamore. As Mr. Bowditch sleeps, Charlie explores the old man’s library and finds a huge collection of fairy tales. He reads through several versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk” and notes that some have happy endings, while others end badly. He notes that in some versions, the giant who faces off with Jack is named Gogmagog.
Charlie falls into a comfortable routine, visiting 1 Sycamore every day to care for Mr. Bowditch and walk Radar. One day, he finds a drug called Lynparza and learns that Mr. Bowditch is using it to treat his end-stage prostate cancer.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Water Under the Bridge. The Fascination of Gold. An Old Dog. Newspaper News. An Arrest.”
During Charlie’s spring break, the local newspaper runs a headline reporting that the Stantonville gold buyer, Wilhelm Heinrich, was robbed and murdered. A man named Benjamin Dwyer is arrested for the crime, but Charlie believes that he is a patsy. Charlie asks Mr. Bowditch to keep his gun downstairs for safety reasons. He continues to wonder where Mr. Bowditch sourced his wealth.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Thing in the Shed. A Dangerous Place. 911. The Wallet. A Good Conversation.”
One day when Charlie shows up to take Radar for a walk, strange noises begin to come from “the goddam shed” (139), louder than last time and accompanied by the door rattling. Mr. Bowditch unlocks the shed and enters with his gun, warning Charlie to stay out. Two shots are fired, and Mr. Bowditch emerges looking worse for wear. Several days later, he calls Charlie in the midst of a heart attack. He requests that Charlie take care of Radar and advises that “everything else you need is also under the bed” (159). Charlie calls an ambulance, but Mr. Bowditch dies on the way to the hospital.
Under the bed at 1 Sycamore, Charlie finds Mr. Bowditch’s gun and his keyring, as well as a cassette recorder and a wallet. The driver’s license inside the wallet is forged. After Mr. Bowditch’s funeral, his lawyer, Leon Braddock, reveals that Mr. Bowditch left everything he owned to Charlie. When Charlie returns to 1 Sycamore after the funeral, the normally-locked gate is hanging wide open.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Wreckage. Mrs. Richland. Obit Thieves. The Tale of the Tape. Inside the Shed. The Tale of the Tape, Continued.”
The inside of 1 Sycamore Street is in disarray. The house was robbed, but the robber did not manage to open the safe in Mr. Bowditch’s bedroom. Charlie previously relocated the gold and money that were inside it.
Charlie questions a neighbor named Ms. Richland about what she saw before the robbery, and she mentions interacting with an odd, short man wearing a White Sox cap: Christopher Polley. Charlie is sure that this man is both the thief and the murderer who killed Wilhelm Heinrich.
Entering the overturned house again, Charlie listens to Mr. Bowditch’s tape. Mr. Bowditch recorded the tape during his fatal heart attack. In it, he explains the mystery of his past. He is Howard Adrian Bowditch and was born in 1884, making him 120 years old at the time of his death. He lived as Adrian Bowditch until the age of 78, then left town and returned at age 40 under the guise of being Adrian’s son, Howard. Here, Mr. Bowditch advises Charlie to pause the tape and go out to the shed.
Charlie enters the shed to find the body of a cockroach “as big as a full-grown cat” (181), which decomposes quickly in the fresh air blowing in from the open door. There is a pile of boards and cinderblocks covering an old well in the ground, but beneath a loose board, Charlie finds a set of stairs spiraling down into the well. Several massive cockroaches skitter around inside the well.
Returning to the house, Charlie resumes the tape. Mr. Bowditch goes on to explain that the hole in the shed is “the well of the worlds,” (28) a portal to a different world. He discovered the well accidentally in 1919 and has been back countless times with Radar. The other world accessible through the well has two moons named Bella and Arabella. It contains a city that was once a grand place but has fallen into despair because it’s ruled by something “dangerous and terrible” (189). The other world is home to strange creatures that die on contact with earthly air, but the other world’s air is not harmful to people or animals, and Mr. Bowditch has been several times with Radar.
In the city’s central plaza, near an old palace, there is a large, turning sundial that grants longevity. This is how Mr. Bowditch extended his own life span and Radar’s, but he cautions that he “paid a price” (190) for his actions. He encourages Charlie to take Radar to the sundial and prolong her life but warns him to closely follow the path marked by his initials: A.B. He is frightened of what would happen if the public discovered the well and woke up the “terrible god” that sleeps in the other world.
Flabbergasted, Charlie returns home.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Night. School Daze. Dad Leaves. The Well of the Worlds. The Other. The Old Woman. A Nasty Surprise.”
At school, Charlie is distracted. His father will be leaving that upcoming Tuesday for a business retreat, and Charlie plans to explore the well of the worlds while he’s gone. In the school library, he reads fairy tales, paying particular attention to “Jack and the Beanstalk.” He discovers that older versions of the tale have one of two endings: a happy one, and a darker one about “the joys of plunder and murder” (200).
On Tuesday morning, Charlie heads to 1 Sycamore Street and enters the well of the worlds. He walks down the stairs and through the tunnel, feeling the lightheadedness that Mr. Bowditch described in the tape. Eventually, he emerges into a field of poppies with a small cottage. At the cottage, he meets Dora, a woman whose face is “cruelly deformed” as if it has been drawn and then erased. Dora has trouble speaking but is able to understand Charlie’s English, though he finds himself unable to say certain words like “nickname” and “awesome sauce.” Through stilted communication, Charlie learns that Dora considered Mr. Bowditch a friend, but she hasn’t seen him since Radar was a puppy. She warns him that the journey to the sundial is dangerous and points out the initials A.B. carved above her back door.
Charlie walks back through the tunnel and contemplates his journey. As he reaches the top of the steps and emerges into the shed, someone presses a gun to his head.
Chapters 7-11 Analysis
In these chapters, Fairy Tale shifts from a realistic narrative to a portal fantasy. A portal fantasy is a subgenre in which a protagonist is magically transported to a different world, often through key objects. Famous portal fantasies include Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. The change occurs when Charlie discovers the well of the worlds, whose name is a likely reference to Henry Kuttner’s 1952 science-fiction novel of the same name. In Kuttner’s novel, protagonist Sawyer goes through a portal to another dimension and finds himself in the midst of a power struggle between good and evil forces. This allusion and Mr. Bowditch’s tape hint that Charlie will face a similar dilemma, as the once peaceful land of Empis has fallen under the control of “a terrible god” (189). King is constructing a meta-narrative, a story within a story peppered with ironic hints and tongue-in-cheek callouts directed at his readership. An extra layer of understanding can be gleaned by readers who are familiar with the other books King references within his own.
The land of Empis is the fairy tale kingdom within Fairy Tale. The well is “Mr. Bowditch’s version of Jack’s beanstalk,” (184) and the world beyond it has a different set of rules than the familiar, small town of Sentry’s Rest. Although King offers a small glimpse of Empis at this point, the giant animals and odd linguistic limitations Charlie encounters are enough to clue the reader in to the presence of magic, specifically the kind of magic often found in folk tales and storybooks.
As soon as he crosses through the barrier between worlds, Charlie begins adapting to Empis. He finds himself unable to use modern slang, but he manages to communicate with Dora in her antiquated English dialect. The ease with which he adapts to these new linguistic quirks plays into the theme of The Insurmountable Power of Fate as it seems that Charlie’s life has somehow been preparing him to end up in Empis. This is a common trope in portal fantasies, where the protagonist is often selected by some outside force and must complete a particular task before they can return to their original world.
In Chapter 11, Charlie again delves into the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” this time with a specific focus on the “lighter” and “darker” endings. If the stairs down to well of the worlds are the beanstalk, then it follows that Charlie, having descended them, is now Jack. As a reimagined version of the fairy tale’s protagonist, he will eventually experience either a happy or an unhappy ending based on the choices he makes while in the other reality. The unhappy ending is brought about by giving in to “the joys of plunder and murder” (200), suggesting that Charlie will need to exercise morality and self-control if he wants to achieve his objectives in Empis. This emphasis on different endings complicates the role of fate in the story; while Charlie is fated to take this journey, the outcome is not predetermined, and he can determine his own path by behaving heroically or evilly.
In his deathbed message, Mr. Bowditch tells Charlie that he “paid a price” (190) for prolonging his life on Lilimar’s sundial and taking gold from Empis. Here, King builds on the theme of Moral Deserts. The moral desert is a philosophical concept that holds that behaving well yields rewards, while immoral behavior is punished. So far in Fairy Tale, this karmic concept does not apply to every character. Charlie’s mother, for example, was a kind person who died in an accident of random chance; there is nothing fair about the way she died or the way Charlie and his father suffered as a result of the tragic event. The real world is more complicated, but Empis is a world built on fairy tale rules. In this storybook setting, the concept of moral deserts gains relevance, reflecting the simpler moral logic inherent in the genre.
When he first sees the wreckage of Mr. Bowditch’s house after the robbery, Charlie remarks that he “caught [himself]” because it reminds him of the destruction he and Bertie Bird used to cause. Charlie doesn’t like to be reminded of unkind things he’s done in the past because they make him feel like he isn’t a good person. He tries to suppress his shame by keeping his past a secret from his father and quashing the part of him that was exhilarated by his former exploits. The intensity of his guilt reveals the strength of his desire to become a better person. This also builds on the theme of The Universal Capacity for Evil by reinforcing that goodness is the sum of our choices, and Charlie is consistently working toward being good and not evil.
When Charlie returns to his original world, Christopher Polley’s attack provides a stark reminder of mundane evils that hide in plain sight. Polley is not Gogmagog or a bloodthirsty giant. He is a realistically flawed human, maddened by greed to the extent that he is willing to endanger human lives over gold. Unlike Charlie, Christopher Polley makes bad, harmful choices–his capacity for evil is understood, but it remains to be seen whether he will earn his moral deserts in the real world. While fairy tales reflect amplified and exaggerated versions of humanity’s flaws, King reminds us that there are plenty of horrors lurking in the human heart which need no enhancement.
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