Book Review – Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Author: Neil Gaiman
Cover Artist: Richard Aquan
Publisher: William Morrow
Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: September 2006

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas–abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken–and what could be more frail than that?–Neil Gaiman in the Introduction to Fragile Things

Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things is a collection of short stories. The author is fascinated by stories: where they come from, what they have to say, how they endure for years, even centuries. The majority of these stories were previously published in various anthologies, e-zines, etc, and more than a few are award winners.

The first story, A Study in Emerald, begins:

“It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.

But I am woolgathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.”

A beginning that many of the stories share in that the reader is told that something grand but not necessarily good is forthcoming, but then it is explained that the narrator is but a humble man relating the truth of the story as he knows it. This first story was a wonderful pastiche of Sherlock Holmes with a heavy dose of Lovecraft thrown in. Gaiman has a way of combining the practical with the supernatural and coming up with something utterly unique and more than a bit disquieting.

His stories ranged from the adroit, such as October in the Chair where the months of the year are engaging in their annual meeting:

“October was in the chair, so it was chilly that evening, and the leaves were red and orange and tumbled from the trees that circled the grove.”

and Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire (Gaiman does seem to have a fondness for lengthy titles) about an author struggling to write,

“Real literature. Real life. The real world. It’s an artist’s job to show people the world they live in. We hold up mirrors.”

But, as Gaiman shows us, what’s real is relative. Or irrelevant.

Some stories were violent and disturbing (Keepsakes and Treasures) while others were quirky and fun (Harlequin Valentine) based on the comic servant of the commedia dell’arte and his eternal pursuit of Columbina). And then some were just comically bizarre (Sunbird: an Epicurean club) whose goal is to eat everything, and I mean everything!)

Although many of the stories leaned towards horror, Gaiman is a multifaceted writer whose poetic deftness is exemplified in the following passage from How to Talk to Girls at Parties. When Enn comments on Triolet’s name, she explains that it’s a verse form like herself; when Enn questions her meaning she explains further:

“We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again.”

“And then what happened?”

My personal favorite was Diseasemaker’s Croup, which was written as an entry in a book of imaginary diseases that was edited by Jeff Vandermeer and Mark Roberts. A clever and ironic piece of medical text that was oddly amusing even though it quickly became evident that the physician writing said entry was also a victim of said ailment.

The last story is a novella based on American Gods. Fans of that book should enjoy this story as it catches up with Shadow some two years later in Scotland.

Only a couple or so of the thirty-one stories fell flat: either nothing remarkable happened (The Flints of Memory Lane) or the author’s intent was too elusive for me (as in Pages from a Journal Found in a Shoebox…Louisville, Kentucky-another one of those really long titles.)

Otherwise, this book is an engaging and varied collection of “short fictions and wonders” as Fragile Things is aptly subtitled.

View/Post Comments

Buy it now at Amazon!