Fairy Tale

First third of the book is good on it's own and would have been a great start for one of his other horror novels, but it didn't fit well with the story being told here. Too much of the book was dedicated to world building in the real world just to slip through a portal into a completely different world, this first section would be more suited if we had stayed in the real world.

Second third was an interesting introduction to the Fairy Tale world, but is where we get into King equating people with bodily issues as being scary? I believe the “King of Horror” could to do better than that this far into his career. Not to mention that the hero Empis needs is a blonde hair blue eyed white boy? Was he really going to be unable to help them if his hair stayed it's original color? Is there some unspoken fairy tale logic that prevents brown eyed men from being a prince? It's a fantasy world. It could have been literally anything that made him stand out, but King went for blue eyes and blonde hair.

And finally the third part was like reading a story that King was forced to write instead of a King wanted to tell. Like maybe he got bored of the idea part way through.

I feel like this is a 2.5 but I've decided to round down for the main character's appearance unnecessarily changing and for a bad guy that ended up not being as relevant as he should have been for all the hype at the beginning.