Buy The Eyes of the Dragon from Bookshop.org.

Rating: 2 out of 5 unfeasible escape strategies

However The Eyes of the Dragon is right on the money. It’s a fantasy tale in which the eyes of a dragon play a fairly major role. So you can’t say I shouldn’t have expected what I got.

My major issue with the book is that it’s written for a younger audience, which I didn’t realise in enough time to adjust my expectations. Now, there’s nothing wrong with books written for younger teens and tweens and whatever other eens are slotting into marketing agency glossaries these days. But King’s approach to it seems to have been to remove all the real grit from his writing.

The result is a story that feels like it leans a bit too hard into the tales of Merlin, and away from, for example, The Talisman. King Arthur etc. is all well and good, but it is broad-stroke morality tales and mysticism in a stiff English tongue, rather than the world of difficult greys in a folksy American twang that King owns.

King just doesn’t feel like King when the writing lacks teeth. But again, this wasn’t called The Teeth of the Dragon, so this is a flaw in my expectations, not necessarily the book.

Review (i.e. 70 spoilers-per-mile)

To his credit, King has created a superb villain in Flagg, and it’s no wonder that he crops up in various other King outings. As the embodiment of evil, he does an even better job than Piers Morgan. And the final scenes, where the gloves come off and we see his true form, both morally and physically, are genuinely excellent.

The issue is more with the somewhat formal English style, which reads like how an American imagines English people spoke in Ye Olde Days. It doesn’t ring true, and that hollow sound undermines the whole book.

Another problem for me was the boringness of the book’s heroes. Peter is the True King, handsome, clever, talented and brave. King could have done so much more with it than the simple royalty-gargling blueprint that too-often comes with the territory. Similarly, Peter’s rescuer Ben is handsome, clever, talented and brave. They’re both like vanilla ice cream with all the vanilla removed. A cocktail of crushed ice and nothing more.

Thomas has a bit more conflict to him, but that seems to make him weaker as a character, not stronger. Rather than making him more three-dimensional, it makes him two-dimensional in a different way: most assuredly not the True King – he’s even chubby for crying out loud.

I worry that some of my issues with the novel are similar to those of the entitled wang-bags who hounded King with criticism and whining after this was published, because he had dared to try something different. But I genuinely like that King tried something different here, and that he has regularly done so across his career, like Bowie or Madonna or when that one from East 17 decided to try eating three baked potatoes and running himself over. It’s just that the result doesn’t particularly grab me, so while I champion his right to do it, I also humbly submit my own right not to enjoy it much.