tani reviewed on
Helpful Score: 7
Although I have not been able to bring myself to read more than a bit of Barker's other works, this one is beautifully plotted and beautifully written. I have read it twice. It reads like a modern fairy tale, and I feel that it is mistakenly classified as horror. Granted, horror is an element in many fairy tales, but the fear in this one is nothing like what you find, for instance, in a Stephen King story. It is the delicious fear of a fairy tale, when you know that the bad thing could never really happen to anybody, but the writer has gotten you to suspend disbelief. There is a sort of moral to the story, too, which is another frequent element in fairy tales, but I must leave the reader to discover for himself what that it, because I don't want to give away the ending.
