Sorry I've been gone! I've been reading, I've just been lazy about writing things. Anyways, from the title you'd be thinking that there's a lot of Neil Gaiman love going on in my life lately... Well, not really. I thought this was going to be a full-blown sequel to American Gods (ugh, how embarrassing, but this makes me want to read it again...), so I was little disappointed. There's a novella sequel to it, but reading a lot of Stephen King has spoiled me in the sense that I was expecting the novella to be about 150 pages longer... (55 pages!?) I also... Well, Neil Gaiman's short stories aren't really my thing, or at least they don't appeal to me as much as his longer stuff. The shorter stuff... A lot of the stories feel like they're lacking something, even when they are good. So I admit that I skipped more than a few (also the poetry) and I peaced out halfway through some because I got bored. (Sorry.) Oh, and I thought this was the collection of short stories with the original "Murder Mystery" story adaptation too, sooo...
The first story I did just plain skip--it was a Sherlock Holmes-style story, "A Study in Emerald"--a parody of "A Study in Scarlet". I hate Sherlock Holmes. I love the show, but the books are too dry for me, and in print, Sherlock always seems like an insufferable, arrogant jerk (Cumberbatch can get away with that because he's gorgeous and has a voice like Alan Rickman). I tried to give it a go, but it got to the "Rache"--an exact scene lifted from the Holmes story--and I was done.
So! The first thing I have anything to say about is "October in the Chair". This story was dedicated to Ray Bradbury, who, as you probably know, just recently passed away. Anyways, this story was written long before that, so... The basic premise is that all the months, personified (with pretty accurate characterizations, I think) meet once a month (I believe) and tell a tale. You only see about two stories, which is what disappointed me about this one. Maybe every month telling a story would be tedious, but... At least like... three? Four? One whole season or... Well, anyways, October tells us a story of a looked-over boy who runs away because he is sick of being ignored. After much travelling, he makes friends with a ghost, and decides he'd rather stay with his ghost friend than be found. So his ghost friend directs him to a house where "they" (different beings) live, who might enable him to stay... Implying that they'd kill him. And it ends with him still outside and hearing a noise inside the house. A good story... but it felt malnourished. Probably my favourite in the book, though. I wonder what Bradbury had to say about it?
The next story was "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire"... I zoned out during this one. What I did note, though, is that a young author who is frustrated by his inability to write what he wants well is visited by a talking raven. This was written after Sandman--and although it's a connection to Poe too, one can't help but think of Matthew, Dream's feathered companion.
Another story, "Closing Time". Again, it seemed interesting--a man tells a story of an event that happened when he was a boy, there's a bit of a mystery--he went to a strange playhouse, or hut, as I imagined it. Very, very condensed version is that he went with three older, boisterous boys, they come in, never come out, and he returns home. Creepy on its own, good, but the framing device which returns at the end hurts it and just serves as a distracting factor.
The perfect story in this collection--and my actual favourite--is "Other People". At first I didn't get the title, exactly, but I realized pretty quickly (though you won't really understand it till the end) that it was a play on that saying, you know, that "hell is other people". It is so good that I have provided you with a link. It takes about five minutes to read. (I wonder what happens to the old demons after...?)
I swear I've read "The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch". I know I have--from the very start, I was sure I knew it. I was less sure about the very end, but I was sure that I've seen it, or a very similar story, somewhere before... (Cirque du Freak? Petshop of Horrors?) Anyways. That was my statement, and this: "She curved like a Raymond Chandler smile" (Gaiman 143). Could you tell that this story was written in 1998? I was dying.
Oh OKAY. The next story I have notes on is "The Problem of Susan". Neil Gaiman said he wrote this because the treatment of Susan in the Narnia books always bothered him. Understandable, but... Susan was a bitch. Her and her nylons, and invitations... I mean, really! Anyway, the story goes on--some people aren't sure if the old professor is just some lady who knows fantasy lit, or the actual Susan. I think it has to be Susan. A young girl interviews her on "the problem of Susan" (why her siblings went to paradise while she alone remained on earth and didn't receive the touch of the divine paw, so to speak), and as the girl describes it, the old professor (who is the right age) describes the same situation from a personal view... She talks about identifying the bodies (Remember, the Pevensie children die in a train crash at the end of The Last Battle!)... She specifically says Ed! Edmund, of course! (Edmond?) She even says that there's no way that a god who would punish a girl who "lik[es] nylons and parties" (Gaiman 187) would be an entirely kind fellow--"'enjoying himself a bit too much, isn't he?'" (Gaiman 187). The people who read this and didn't realize that it was the Susan (married and divorced, husband died, etc--) weren't really paying attention at all. Anyways--it gets awkward after that, and Susan politely dismisses the interviewing girl for good.
Later that night, both women dream: Susan of a Mary Poppins book that the author never wrote while living (Sandman again, Lucien's library!), and the young girl interviewing (Greta, and okay, in her mid-twenties) dreams too--and um, be warned. It's gross, in a deeply disturbing way. I have never felt nauseous from just reading something--this changed that. Here:
"She is standing on the battlefield, holding her sister's hand... The witch looks at them all, then she turns to the lion, and says, coldly, 'I am satisfied with the terms of our agreement. You take the girls: for myself, I shall have the boys.' She understands what must have happened, and she runs, but the beast is upon her before she has covered a dozen paces. The lion eats all of her except her head... She wishes that he had eaten her head, then she would not have had to look. Dead eyelids cannot be closed, and she stares, unflinching... The great beast eats her little sister more slowly, and, it seems to her, with more relish and pleasure than it had eaten her, but then, her little sister had always been its favorite. The witch removes her white robes, revealing a body no less white, with high, small breasts, and nipples so dark they are almost black. The witch lies back in the grass, spreads her legs. Beneath her body, the grass becomes frost. 'Now,' she says. The lion licks her white cleft with its pink tongue, until she can take no more of it, and she pulls its huge mouth to hers, and wraps her icy legs into its golden fur... Being dead, the eyes in the head on the grass cannot look away. Being dead, they miss nothing. And when the two of them are done, sweaty and sticky and sated, only then does the lion amble over to the head on the grass and devour it in its huge mouth... The white witch rides naked on the lion's golden back. Its muzzle is spotted with fresh, scarlet blood. Then the vast pinkness of its tongue wipes around its face, and once more it is perfectly clean'" (Gaiman 189-190).
Yeah. So. I'm thinking the message is that no-one is just plain good and perfect, and no-one is just plain evil, and they get mingled in all sorts of ways. But honestly, I don't want to think about this story too much.
"Fifteen Painted Cards From a Vampire Tarot" was pretty intriguing too. It was made up of several shorts wed together, and each short was enough so that it didn't need anything more. I know that's weird, compared to what I've been complaining about, but it works... I mention it mostly because it hints at that popular notion that Jesus was a vampire--well, maybe popular isn't the right word, but it crops up from time to time, and more than you think. (The idea comes from the "this is my blood, this is my body...", the fact that Jesus came back from the dead... One story I read implied that this is why Dracula--because Dracula was that vampire in question in the story--feared the cross, because his original death had taken place on it... Oh, and because of the eternal life promised--"[Christianity] was the only religion that delivered exactly what it promised: life eternal for its adherents" [Gaiman 211].) Soooo yeah.
"In the End" was really cool, too. It plays on the idea of entropy--at least I believe the concept is entropy, forgive me if it isn't, the last astronomy class I took was two years ago--but the idea that I'm thinking of is that, instead of the world ending just like that, the world reaches a certain point... and then things run backwards. You live your life backwards. Everything in the universe runs backwards, until the big bang, and then some people think it goes back, or it keeps on running backwards into nothingness like that. Well, "In the End" plays on that with a religious twist. You'll see what I mean when you read it. (If you Google it, there's a free .mp3 of it online, but I don't really like it read...)
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties" is mentioned just because two teenaged boys go to the wrong party and I think one of them almost accidentally has sex with a space alien. Or something? My attention for this book in general was going at this point, but also they mention David Bowie twice in this story, and that's pretty cool.
And the novella that's a sequel to American Gods--I haven't a terrible amount to say about it. I guess my feelings on this whole thing are mainly negative, and I feel bad about that because I really do like Neil Gaiman, but this collection just wasn't my thing. Anyways, the only thing I have to mention about it is that it's set two years after the novel, and Shadow reflects on this, saying that he is 35 now. Now, in the actual book, Shadow dies and comes back reminiscent of a Norse god--the god Odin, in fact. He was hung on a tree and even stabbed in the side. And then Odin comes back. Early people hoping to make converts out of Norsemen connected him to Jesus as one way to make Christianity more appealing or more familiar. So! If it was two years ago, Shadow was 33 then. Jesus was supposedly 33 1/2 when he was crucified and subsequently resurrected. So... So yeah! Wooh, connections.
My other note is that it features a character named Mr Alice, who appears in one of the earlier stories of this collection...
So yeah... That's it. This book wasn't for me, but maybe it'll be for you! Good night!
MLA Citation Information: Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things. William Morrow: United States of America, 2006.
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