Fragile Things

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How to Talk to Girls at Parties" – nominated for the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Short Story and won the Locus Award for Best Short Story One story was inspired by a Lisa Snellings-Clark statue of a man holding a double bass, just as I did when I was a child; the other was written for an anthology of real-life ghost stories. Most of the other authors managed tales that were rather more satisfying than mine, although mine had the unsatisfying advantage of being perfectly true. These stories were first collected in Adventures in the Dream Trade, a miscellany published by NESFA Press in 2002, which collected lots of introductions and oddments and such. CLOSING TIME Inventing Aladdin" (3 stars)- Another poem taking a look at Scheherazade. This was one of the few poems in the collection that I enjoyed.

Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" – gothic story published in the anthology Gothic! It was some months before I could think clearly enough to write, and this was the first piece of fiction I attempted. It was like learning to walk all over again. It was written for Al Sarrantonio’s Flights, an anthology of fantasy stories. In the spirit of mild self-immolation, I plowed my way through in bits and pieces over perhaps two weeks--okay, now it's more like four--never able to take more than a story or two at a time. Here's what I think: Gaiman is successful because he is popular and slightly pushes boundaries in a currently fashionable, ie. noir way. Occasionally he does lovely things with words and had fabulous ideas, and I hear he's a very nice guy. However, for me, his writing is very uneven, and feels like it would benefit from longer incubation, and perhaps closer affinity with whatever genre he prefers. I'm not a horror fan, but so many of his short stories seem to delight in twists, and I'm not just referring to the surprise ending. One scholarly book I read explained that any fairy story in which a character falls asleep obviously began life as a dream that was recounted on waking by a primitive type unable to tell dreams from reality, and this was the starting point for our fairy stories—a theory which seemed filled with holes from the get-go, because stories, the kind that survive and are retold, have narrative logic, not dream logic.But we're colder than you are. Deader. I miss daylight and food and knowing how it feels to touch someone and care. I remember life, and meeting people as people and not just as things to feed on or control, and I remember what it was to feel something, anything, happy or sad or anything..." And then she stopped. I love Neil Gaiman. He is brilliant, imaginative, and abso- friggin-lutely weird, and I love him for it. And this book of short stories and prose, Fragile Things, is by far my most favorite compendium of his. I admire a person who can say so many things, that can share complex thoughts and mixed emotions with simple words:

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence. It seemed like a fine title for a book of short stories. There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts. A STUDY IN EMERALDThe emperor was contented by this, for the better part of a year, and then he noticed within himself a growing dissatisfaction with his island, and he began, in the time before he slept, to plan another map, fully one one-hundredth the size of his dominions. Every hut and house and hall, every tree and hill and beast would be reproduced at one one-hundredth of its height. Instructions – a poem giving instructions about what to do when you find yourself in a fairy tale (3 stars) Keepsakes and Treasures: A Love Story" – began as a comic for Oscar Zarate's collection, It's Dark in London illustrated by Warren Pleece. Contains the characters Mr. Alice and Mr. Smith, a pair of dubious men who also appeared in a Gaiman novella called The Monarch of the Glen, suggesting that this tale is a part of the American Gods universe as well. Bitter Grounds" (2 stars)-This story seemed endless and nonsensical. I am still trying to figure out what happened to the anthropology professor so maybe that's why I could not get into this story.