Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist

1094 Words3 Pages

Faerie Tale follows the tale of the Hastings family and their move to a rural mansion in New York. The Hastings family includes; Phil Hastings, a screenwriter working on a novel and his wife, retired actress, Gloria Hastings, Phil's daughter, Gabbie, a wealthy heiress from Phil's previous marriage, and twin boys, Sean and Patrick, who are particularly targeted by the “bad thing” in the story. The “bad thing” is a minion of the evil faerie king who is attempting to re-enter the mortal world before the “moving” closes the temporary portal between worlds on midnight on Halloween. Throughout the story different characters help the Hastings in different ways. Most helpful are the Irish immigrant Barney Doyle who eventually tells Sean how to save Patrick from the faerie realm, and Mark Blackman, an author who provides information along the way every time a new secret about the mansion is revealed. In the end the Erl King is killed only to be replaced by the fairy that kills him, revealing the cyclical nature of the fairy realm and how the creatures are not truly immortal but trapped in a predestined loop that forever repeats the same story; the queen and king to be fall in love, a child is stolen, it is fought over resulting in a demi-war between two factions, with the new king to be sometimes killing the evil king to become a good king or siding with evil king to become an evil king and killing the queen. Various “plot twists” can occur but the faeries know that the end result will always be the crowning of a new king and queen through the shedding of blood.
Novel Analysis
From the beginning it becomes obvious that many of the characters represent familiar archetypes. Gabbie is a budding young virgin, beautiful, innocent, and vulner...

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...l world from having the fairy realm invade it.
Feist does little to reinvent the original fairy tales of Europe, even keeping the names Titania and Oberon, as well as the original story of Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream in which the bad thing ends up being the indian boy stolen from that story. He instead simply continues the story into the modern world, though Sean soon finds out that he must use the ancient methods of protection, fairy stones and silver, to defeat the Erl King. By doing this he continues the cycle that the Fairy Queen and The Fool tell them has been going from the beginning. Even the fears of Sean in the beginning allude to the unchanging universal fears. He is afraid of the dark, of the creature looming in the woods, of death. By using the child's innocence Feist can present these fears unadulterated by adult rationalism and cynicism.

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