Reviewed by Jeanne
Let me start off by admitting that I am somewhat intimidated
by Mr. Gaiman. I often have the feeling
that I am just too dense to understand some of his work. Also, most of it has at least a trickle of
darkness (if not a flood!) and I have to be in a certain frame of mind to read
it. For me, I find that his shorter
fiction appeals to me a bit more. Just
because it’s short doesn’t mean it can’t pack a wallop.
And while there’s always a bit of darkness, that doesn’t
mean humorless. Gaiman has a great deal
of wit and sly humor glimmering between the lines.
Smoke and Mirrors, as he
explains in the don’t-miss introduction, refers to methods that stage magicians
have used to fool viewers into believing impossible things. Stories do the same thing; they appear to
present a truth; but do they? Readers should be prepared to question everything
as they fall through the author’s rabbit hole.
Or they can just enjoy the ride.
The collection includes poetry as well as stories, but the
poems are just as haunting. The fiction
ranges from very short—just a smidge over a page—but most are around ten
pages. Some knowledge of Lovecraft will
enhance appreciation for a couple of stories, but knowing a bit of folklore
will almost always help. I find them all to be very visual, a veritable
marathon of “Twilight Zone” or “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” episodes. In the
introduction itself, Gaiman briefly discusses each entry. I bookmarked that section and would go back
to read what he’d said about a particular work after I had read it. Then sometimes I would read the story again. Most of the stories were written for
particular themed anthologies (fantasy erotica, retellings of Grimm folktales,
computer fiction, etc.) while others came from more general suggestions—cats and
angels are popular, so why not write a story about a cat who is an angel? (The
resulting story didn’t appear for some years and then in quite a different
form.)
There’s really not a clunker in the whole collection, but
for me the standouts were:
·
The Wedding
Present which appears as part of the introduction is a tale Gaiman
intended to write as a wedding gift for friends until he decided that perhaps
they’d rather have a toaster. What would happen if, as a wedding gift, you
received a book which wrote the story of your marriage—or rather, a story? One that might or might not be
true?
·
In Chivalry,
Mrs. Whitaker finds the Holy Grail.
It was right there under a coat in the thrift shop and quite pretty it
is, too, but this young man keeps coming up and asking for it so he can fulfill
his quest….
·
The
Price is an unforgettable tale of a black cat and his devotion to
his family. By all means, though, go
back and read Gaiman’s comments on the story in the introduction. It made me
feel a lot better about the whole thing.
·
Shoggoth’s
Old Peculiar is a bit of a cautionary tale in which one can
be led astray by relying too much on guidebooks. The first sentence is a delight, and I
thought the story just got better from there. I forced a colleague to listen to
me read parts of it aloud because I thought it was so funny.
·
The structure of Murder Mysteries gave me pause because I made the mistake of
starting it and then not finishing it the same day. Our narrator meets a man in the park who tells
him a story in return for a cigarette, and his story so dominates the plot that
after my break I had forgotten that he was telling the tale to someone
else. He was, he says, an angel—Raguel,
to be specific, the Vengeance of the Lord, and it was his job to investigate
the death of another angel. It’s a
mesmerizing tale and one indeed to consider long after the last page has been
turned.
As I said at the beginning, I find Mr. Gaiman’s work to be a
bit of a challenge so I sort of take a deep breath before I plunge in—but it’s definitely
worth it. I shivered, I laughed, and I
pondered. That’s more than I can say
about a lot of stories.
Posted for Sandra:
ReplyDeleteHe is a wonder, sometimes best taken in small bits. I've been reading myth/saga/fairy and folktales most of my life, so those connections are always a delight to see, and they range quite widely. Some I like better than others, true, but that's to be expected. And never skip the introduction or notes in his books; sometimes the best stuff is there.