FAIRY TALE

 

WELL, THIS ONE WAS A SURPRISE!

Stephen King's latest doorstop, I mean novel, has a regular guy stepping unexpectedly into ANOTHER WORLD that looks suspiciously like Oz -- poppy field, Emerald City and all.  He's questing for a supposed fountain of youth that will save the life of his elderly dog.  But aside from this, he finds 2 other things that only readers conversant with this book will understand:

Almost the very first thing he finds in this strange land, called Empis, is THE CURSE OF GREYFACE.  Most of the people he comes across are blighted with gray skin and deformed faces.  They find it hard to make themselves understood when they speak.  Moving gets harder and harder.  They're not pretty to look at.  In short, life for them has become a straitjacket affair rather than the happy romance they once knew.  SOUND FAMILIAR?  Yeah, baby, it's right in the pages of the Principia.  

Something else he finds, much farther down the road to the Emerald City, is a character named ERIS.  If you know your Stephen King, you realize immediately that she's ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS, because the author never describes her to us.  (If you don't know: King only really describes his villains, and you never find out what the protagonist or most of the other positive people in his stories look like.  This novel is no exception to that rule.)

And who is Eris in this story?  She's a woman he barely knows, except that they both find themselves in the same bad spot.  He tells us nothing about her -- age, race, hair color -- except to point out that she, like the protagonist, is FREE OF THE CURSE OF GREYFACE.  She ends up fighting at his side in a fairly desperate situation.  After the fighting is over, she makes a fairly random offer to him, and he randomly accepts.  I have no idea why she offered or why he accepted.  THAT'S ALL IN KEEPING WITH EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT ERIS FROM THE PRINCIPIA.

For further information, you can either read these two books...or consult your pineal gland!