The Eyes of the Dragon (urspr publ 1987; utgåvan 1987)

King is a discerning and powerful writer, especially with regard to human relationships and family dynamics. The setting is medieval-fantasy, but could be anywhere with regard to the psychological situation of the boy who is the focus of the story.
People do good things for bad reasons, and bad things for good reasons. And the evil people in this story do very bad things for very bad reasons.

My first reservation about giving this to teens is the sexually intimate scenes of the king and his wife, although the action is conveyed through verbal innuendo, so it might pass muster for some parents.

My second reservation is exactly the powerful description of dysfunctional relationships that might need some guidance for younger readers.

My only other quibble is about Prince Peter's remarkable escape from the tower, but we have to make some allowances for the genre and target-age.
However, King is using the situation to demonstrate how our decisions and actions are often compromised by lack of accurate information.

NOTES:
p. 129: "That is the story, and sometimes stories tell more than histories, and more quickly, too."

And other good excerpts omitted for now:
pp. 142, 145-7, 169, 179, 185, 199, 205, 213, 216, 227-9, 231 vs 233, 242, 286 especially, 299, 318-23 ( )

This is not like any other Stephen King book. I choose it because it has several characters in it from his other books, but I really don't think it's exactly those characters. This book is a fairy tale. It has a wizard, a dragon, two brothers who are princes in a kingdom, and the story is about what happens between them all and the king. It's a fun read. ( )

I don't remember a lot about this one, beyond the fact that I definitely read it as a teenager.
( )

door Niels:

Het is een spannend boek. Het is een schrijver die goed kan vertellen. ( )

I first read this about a year after it was published and hadn't thought too much about it since then, but for the young kid I was, it happened to be the first fantasy novel I ever read and the second novel... period.

It shaped my idea of what fantasy was, even if I've reformulated that about a million times since then, but let me be frank: I wasn't all that impressed. SF in all its shapes and forms caught my imagination more. In fact, it took something like a decade and a half before I went off the infrequent perusal of fantasies and did huge binge-reads of the genre.

The old castle, kings, queens, and princes just didn't do that much for me.

On the other hand, Stephen King will not be denied. I enjoyed the characters even tho they seemed to be nearly archetypal templates with hardly any differentiation from the ideals, was amused by the whole handkerchief plot, and was immensely interested in Flagg, that bigger-than-life evil bastard that spans many of King's novels.

This re-read didn't change my initial opinion all that much, but the core is still good if not purely fantastic. And this time, I got to wonder at all the kitchen-sink story elements that had been thrown into this tale, straight out of King's earlier novels. Such as the importance of storms, a-la IT, the incorporation of less than bright characters as extremely important heroes in their own rights, and elements of regret, redemption, and forgiveness for even the greatly-flawed and mostly despicable characters.

I haven't seen but a handful of characters in ALL of King's works that can be described as genuinely decent and/or good, but Peter happens to be one. That's pretty wild. :)

No, this isn't a King masterpiece, but it definitely has a lot of charm.

Can you believe it? It's King's only pure fantasy! ( )