Faerie Tale » (Reissue)

Phil Hastings was a lucky man-he had money, a growing reputation as a screenwriter, a happy, loving family with three kids, and he'd just moved into the house of his dreams in rural of magic-and about to be altered irrevocably by a magic more real than any he dared imagine. For with the Magic came the Bad Thing, and the Faerie, and then the cool. . .and the resurrection of a primordial war with a forgotten people-a war that not only the Hastings but the whole human race could lose.

Publishers Weekly

Feist, author of the popular Magician fantasy trilogy, turns to the horror genre in this slick, only partially successful novel of a very modern family newly settled into a house on the edge of an enchanted woods. Each member of the familyretired actress Gloria Hastings, her novelist and screenwriter husband Phil, his teenage daughter by a previous marriage, their twin eight-year-old boys, and a dog and a catis touched in some way by ``the Bad Thing,'' as the boys call it, which turns out to be a forest spirit out of ancient folklore. Feist builds atmosphere with intimations of the supernatural that soon escalate into outright violence. It is the boys who most clearly perceive the Bad Thing, and who eventually confront and defeat it. While the plot has some intriguing features, the book is afflicted by a superficiality of characterization and a flat, uninteresting style. 150,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; BOMC and QPBC selections. (March)