Neil Gaiman Fragile Things

Neil Gaiman dances on tired eyelids!

Reading him is like opening your front door to find a shiny gold sovereign in the beak of a magpie wearing a pink velvet coat!

Fragile Things they are. Fragile because they leap up and samba!

'I like things to be story shaped.

Reality, however is not story shaped, and the eruptions of the odd into our lives are not story shaped either.They do not end in entirely satifactory ways.Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day.'

How far do we all try to resist the stories that are not story shaped?!

Yet with confidence-for-life, we can, like Neil Gaiman, open our doors to Fragile Things and greet with good humour and resourcefulness the magpie wearing the pink velevt coat!

By the way, The magpie just appeared as I was typing.

That's the beauty of Neil Gaiman and FLOW!

Fragile Things

Neil Gaiman

Morrow, Sep 26 2006, $26.95

ISBN: 0060515228

FRAGILE THINGS is the third "short fiction and wonders" anthology (see SMOKE AND MIRRORS and ADVENTURES IN THE DREAM TRADE). The collection consists of thirty-one shorts and poems that run the gamut of creep, fear and scare. The best tale is the haunting shocker October in the Chair though some might insist the return of Shadow from American Gods in the short novella "Monarch of the Glen" or Holmes in "A Study in Emerald" are superior. Overall this is a fine compilation (the poems feel out of place as fans will say nevermore to them) with the theme seeming to out eerie Poe with speculative fiction that crosses horror, science fiction, alternate history, mystery and fantasy lines. Neil Gaiman's fans will want to read at least the short stories and the novella.

Harriet Klausner