There are a lot of Neil Gaiman projects coming out this year that I’m REALLY looking forward to: a graphic novel version of The Graveyard Book (with art by the incomparable P.Craig Russell), a very creepy-looking children’s book adaptation of Hansel and Gretel, an illustrated version of Gaiman’s novelette The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, issue #3 of Sandman: Overture, and quite a few annotative and commemorative versions of previous works. And all of this has been in development while his book The Ocean at the End of the Lane was winning the UK’s National Book Award, The Book of the Year by popular vote, and spending 20 weeks on the NPR Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List.
So I’m sure it’s greedy of me to point out that it’s been eight years since he last released a collection of his own short stories. I’d probably be a little more patient if Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders hadn’t been such a perfect collection.
It’s hard to sum up Neil Gaiman’s usual style, because there’s really nothing usual about Neil Gaiman’s writing. Over the course of his career Gaiman has written examples of fantasy, sci-fi, children’s books, horror (the Sandman issue “24 Hours” is an excellent example of that), and poetry. In Fragile Things you get examples of each of those; thirty-one stories and poems, and not one of them boring.
A few of them – “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire” for example – take more of a humorous tone than I’ve seen Gaiman do before outside of his children’s books. The Victorian-era “A Study in Emerald” looks at a familiar fictional detective in a new light, and Gaiman returns to the world of Shadow and Odin from American Gods in the story “The Monarch of the Glen”. (A fascinating but unpleasant character from that story reappears in “Keepsakes and Treasures”.)
One of my favorites is “How to Talk to Girls and Parties” a wonderful story I’d already read inThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (I really should renew my subscription to that again), about a teenage boy who’s dragged to a party where all the girls attending are…not human in the slightest. You’d think that would feel horrifying or uncomfortably awkward, but we’re talking about an age where the opposite sex already feels like an exotic species, so the main character interacts with every girl he talks to fairly well, by sheer accident.
I did not know what to say to girls, and I told him so.
“They’re just girls,” said Vic. “They don’t come from another planet.”
The best word I can think to describe the stories “Harlequin Valentine” and “Sunbird” is “delightful” (“Sunbird was written as a gift to Gaiman’s teenage daughter). And the best word I can think to describe “The Problem of Susan” is “nightmare”. I mean a real nightmare, where you wake up afterwards so relieved that it wasn’t real, because it’s horrifying. Gaiman had just recovered from a bout of meningitis when he wrote that, and he wanted to explore a part of the Narnia series that had always bothered him. It had bothered me too, but the story he wrote will disturb anyone.
The rest of the stories are a fascinating mix of drama, poetry, horror (“Other People”, another one of my favorites), a new take on vampires, and a series of vignettes based on the twelve songs in Tori Amos’s CD, Strange Little Girls. They’re all a little weird, every one of them different from the rest, and again, not one of them boring.
Do yourself a favor if you pick this book up and read the author’s introduction. Neil Gaiman is right up there with Harlan Ellison and Stephen King for being able to write the best introductions. In fact, Neil’s are probably the best just for the fact that he adds an extra short-story INSIDE the introduction itself.