Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

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.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman series

This is a pretend retrospective, mostly because I finished it a few weeks ago and didn't feel like taping it to the end of the Camus post.  This is going to be short.

First off, this is a good series.  The only thing I've ever read by Gaiman that I wasn't really in love with was Stardust, to be honest.  I've mentioned smidgens here and there about the other volumes, I think--well, the series wraps itself up perfectly.  And I mean, perfectly.  It's kind of like... Like a panel out of Watchmen.  The one I'm thinking of is in the sort-of epilogue, when the first Silk Spectre is making tea while The Outer Limits is just opening on the TV.  Her daughter and the second Night Owl come to the door with the hair dyed and such... And all the panels are synced to the opening of the TV show ("Do not attempt to adjust your TV set..." etc), the steam is acting with it, the actions and items in the background work with it--even Silk Spectre's struggle to recognize her daughter works with it.  It is so ridiculous how detailed and perfect it is--that's what the whole series is like.  You may not necessarily notice every perfect intersecting detail, but it's all there at the end.  That alone is a good reason to read it, I mean, really.
But it is good in its own right.  I mean... I don't know what to say other than what I have already.  If you like comic books and like Neil Gaiman, read it.  It will appeal to people who enjoy fantasy books, mythology books... Gaiman himself describes it as horror, and it is kind of dark, but... I don't know.  When I think horror I either think of something like the Alien movies, or something like a psychological horror, you know.  This did not strike me as being either of those, though there are some disturbing ideas presented here and there, I suppose...
Oh, and there's a companion to the series by Hy Bender that is mostly interviews with Gaiman, and that is amazing.  The first few chapters are rubbish--"Why read a comic book?"--in my personal opinion, if you're asking yourself that, then maybe you ought not be reading it at all, or even considering reading it.  ...Buuuut, once he starts talking about the issues themselves, and presenting the Gaiman interviews, it is very interesting.  Actually one of the coolest parts--other than overlooked details being pointed out, or realizing I was right about certain things, or Gaiman being Gaiman--is seeing how many characters were borrowed from long-forgotten DC comics.  Lucien, Dream's librarian, Cain and Abel, Eve, Prez, the guy who believes he is the new Sandman after Dream was trapped (first volume, I'm pretty sure)... They're all borrowed from mostly failed comic lines by DC in the seventies.  It's actually pretty crazy.  I'd love to find those old comics and read them too, to see how they matched up, you know?  (Especially Lucien's and Prez's.) Hm... I also wonder if Neil Gaiman intended his short story-turned-radio play-turned-comic book Murder Mysteries to sync in with this.  I'm pretty sure that was written even after Hy Bender's Companion book was, though, so he does not mention it.    (Murder Mysteries is about heaven--or the Silver City as it is known in Sandman--prior to Lucifer's fall, although Lucifer is not the main character.  However, he leaves after the main events take place, and you see his original departure from heaven, though the main character leaves before Lucifer begins his assault.)

Hmmm... I guess that's it.  Like I said, I don't have a lot to say--at least nothing particularly important... I'd urge you to read it, if again, you like fantasy, mythos, Neil Gaiman's other works... I highly doubt you'll be disappointed.  But if that is not your thing, don't bother.  I borrowed mine from the library out of convenience (and being flat broke), but actually, it's kind of funny... I just finished the series, and right after that Neil Gaiman announced on his Tumblr that a special edition box set of the series was being released for $125.  In an alternate universe where I am not a flat-broke college student, I have preordered it and await its arrival in excitement.
(And if you're broke, no worries!  This comic is popular and well-known enough for nearly any library to carry at least a few of its volumes!  My college library even has the first two... Actually, I think it's two and four, or something like that.  Well... You know what I mean.)

So yeah!  Go read the series, it's good.  Oh, and the spin-off comics aren't bad either, especially the ones by Jill Thompson--it's the spin-offs of the spin-offs you have to look out for (no thank you, Dead Boy Detectives!)  And sorry that this wasn't more detailed.  I don't have any volumes on me, and I read the whole series in a rather stilted fashion.  So... Sorry.... (But this should only give you more incentive...)

The Time Machine by HG Wells

I was gripped with a sudden urge, while wandering drunkenly through the library (truth?), to reread HG Well's awesome book--it's a little less awesome now than it was four or five years ago (what, is that even real), but it's still good.  Better than the Autocracy of Mr Parham.  Always better than that.  Anything would be better than that.

Anyways, this is the first time machine story ever written.  (Well, the first well-known one in any case.  Shush.)  That has never hit me before reading it this one time--I was reading the section where the Victorian men were trying to puzzle out how the time machine could move back in time if they had never seen it in their friend's room before.  Finally it occurs to one of them that it moves at super speed or whatever as it goes back, and whatever else.  It has never occurred to me before that someone could take the idea of time travel for granted, but I clearly had.  All the late Victorian and turn-of-the-century people probably basically peed themselves when they read this.  Also, I think that it's hilarious that the psychologist is the one who eventually figures out the super speed thing.

Oh, but the story itself--the pioneering scientist travels into the feature which has resulted from people attaining utopia, and then devolving in light of the easy life.  The working class went underground and became gross ape-like monsters who feed on the upper class people, who have devolved into child-like creatures that aren't very bright.  My next note has to do with this--you see, I've read a lot of studies that accredit human brain development to the fact that we started eating more and more meat because we figured out how to cook it and not die.  All of these people ate fruit exclusively.  Maybe HG Wells didn't do this intentionally, or did this just to contrast their purity with the Morlocks' cannibalistic evils, but still, that would definitely have an affect on their brain power and bodies.  So... so yeah.  It's also a bad idea to raise a kid (until age five or six, but even then it's questionable) on a strictly vegetarian diet because of the damage that can do.  (HG Wells also mentions that they're all incredibly weak and light, so that's probably a super protein deficiency.)
Also, when he explains their diet he talks about how all cows and sheep and everything seemed to go extinct. Okay, HG Wells.  Sure.  That makes oodles of sense.  Why bring it up other than to complain?  Well, what he actually says is is that they "followed the Icthyosaurus into extinction" (Wells 32).  Hehe.  Awesome.

Eventually the time travelling narrator befriends one of the future non-Morlock humanoids.  He saves her from drowning--while swimming or playing in a stream she gets a cramp and the moderate current picks her up and takes her away.  Her fellows basically ignore her and leave her for dead, so the narrator dives in after her and rescues her.  She falls in love with him immediately (which, of course, he doesn't understand--he believes for almost the entirety of their friendship that it was just a childish affection) and follows him everywhere.  At first she annoys him, because "'I had not, I told myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation'" (Wells 54).  It's funny because flirtations are considered minor or miniature (as compared to, say, romance or dating or getting married, because it was the Victorian era and getting married was your only option then), and because Weena (the girl) is no more than four feet fall... Ahhh, oh you, HG Wells!
Oh yeah, I always forget that the non-Morlocks are the Eloi, probably because HG Wells only mentions it once.  It means "chosen" in Latin (although one of the baby naming sites it was one says it has Latin and French origins which doesn't really make sense since they developed at different speeds and times...?), which would make sense if these people were supposed to be the privileged upper class.  The French saint of metalworking (no lie) is Saint Eloi.  There doesn't seem to be a clear meaning behind the name Morlock, but apparently HG Wells wrote a quasi-prequel to this book (by quasi-prequel I mean one of his books is set a few centuries into the future and makes intimations that certain groups will develop into the Morlocks eventually.  I wonder if HG Wells really believed that the way HP Lovecraft believed Asian people really would take over the world), which might have some clues in it...?
HG Wells also eventually figures out the true nature and relationship of the Eloi and Morlocks.  He realizes that the Eloi are the main food source of the Morlocks and that explains all of their weird nighttime behaviour. I think he gives the Morlocks too much credit, though.  He says the Eloi are akin to fatted cattle, which the Morlocks "'preserved and preyed upon--probably saw to the breeding of''" (Wells 80).  The Morlocks are clearly more advanced physically than the Eloi, and more advanced mentally because being a predator obviously requires a more complex system of thought, but I don't think they're smart enough to control breeding and preservation and all of that.  I think they're very much like cavemen--knowing where the prey is, and how much there ought to be, but beyond that, not really having a good idea of what's going on.  (But just wait until Equality discovers electricity!)  Though saying the Eloi are akin to fatted cattle is appropriate in what a fatted cattle is, that also automatically brings up the image of farming, which is definitely inappropriate for this situation.

...Also, now that I think of it, what happened to all the people every part of the world that's not London?

My next bit comes when... when that guy who I almost called the Doctor but most definitely is NOT the Doctor realizes he can scare the Morlocks with fire--he gets so excited he tells Weena (the Eloi female) to dance and he dances with her: "'It part it was a modest can-can, in part a step dance, in part a skirt dance (so far as my tail-coat permitted), and in part original.  For I am naturally inventive, as you know'" (Wells 87).  At first I was like woaaah, ego!  But then I remembered that he made a whole damn time machine, so maybe he should be allowed to brag a bit.

Anyways.  He finds his time machine again, and Weena is killed due to his foolishness with the Morlocks--something I apparently misunderstood when I read it all 5,000 times in middle school.  You see, I always thought she was simply stolen away, and that's why the time traveler goes back--to try and save her.  The book ends--well, this edition has an epilogue, which for whatever reason my edition was bereft of--with the time traveler becoming determined to prove that the traveling occurred to our narrator who parrots back everything the traveler said in verbatim.  The time traveler goes back in time, and the narrator tells us that he vanished three years ago and never returned.  I kind of like it better when he's going back to save Weena and gets killed instead, instead of just trying to prove himself, but whatever.  I'm not the one writing classic sci-fi novels at the turn of the century... Yet.
The epilogue is also a little too optimistic--basically the narrator is saying that the traveler could still be alive wandering the future or past, and that the future saw can be changed, and at least love and tenderness still lived on in the Eloi.  It was probably to calm down all the Victorian people, who were probably smoking their smelling salts at that point in an effort to not vomit on everything, but... But ugh!  It's so lame!  It ruins the creepy implications of it!  Stupid Victorians and their fear of absolutely everything.  Anyways.  Other than the lame-butt epilogue, this is Twilight Zone-worthy.  No, I don't care that it predates the Twilight Zone by like seventy (woah, really!??) years.


MLA Citation information: Wells, HG.  The Time Machine.  Robert Bentley, Inc: United States of America, 1895.  (Sorry, this one of those books that are definitely from the mid forties to mid fifties that don't feel like putting legitimate information in their books, which I guess doesn't really matter since this is all public domain and everything.)


I also started reading the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman.  I read a spin-off series (Death: At Death's Door by Jill somebody, which I'm thinking is her specific take on all the events that occurred during the Sandman comics--though I'm not sure because it's only one volume... And I'm only one volume into Sandman.)  and a spin-off of that spin-off (The Dead Boy Detectives) which sucks HARDCORE.  I read Preludes & Nocturnes... I'm not sure if it was a prequel series made after the original series or what, but I jumped into it okay.  There wasn't a huge learning curve, even if Martian Manhunter and the Scarecrow make appearances (yep).  The only other related book was Dream Country, which is a collection of random quasi-related stories... That was good, though.  Plus you get to see Morpheus wearing a ruff, sooo...
But yeah.  I like the series so far, but unfortunately my access to it is limited until the summer (or maybe spring break, if I'm really lucky--shut up I don't have a life at all).  The local library has only these two volumes (I believe), the school library only has The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (I tried reading it again but it's just so baaaaad), and my library at home only has the aforementioned spin-offs.  Soo I'll keep you updated.  But it's cool.  Very cool.

I read JD Salinger's Nine Stories, too.  I can't do a whole post for that--I don't really like focusing on short story collections.  His stories are always all right, and always seem to be constructed okay, if not really well--but the ends are just... just failed.  Talk about going out with a bang instead of a whimper.  I can never quite follow them, for example, "A Perfect Day For Bananafish" starts out with the girl talking to her mother on the phone about her boyfriend, then it goes to the boyfriend who's being kind of creepy on the beach in a robe talking to young girls (yeah, I thought pedophile--even before it mentioned the girls, it was the robe that made me suspicious), who then shoots himself.  It ends with him going into the room where she is sleeping and him loading up a gun a then shooting himself.  I... What?  What, because the little girl ran away before they were done talking or whatever?  What?  The next story does a lot of Holden Caulfield "I mean it--I mean I mean it" stuff that makes me want to pull my hair out.
The Esme story is in here too, and it's probably my favourite.  Well, half of it is.  Half of it is a little slice of life sort of deal, he meets a girl named Esme while in England during the war.  Esme asks him to write her a story, and the second half of that story is presumably it?  I'm not sure.  But he's very good at presenting slice of lifes, just bad at making them do things.  On the plus side, he writes about Connecticut all the time, and that's always exciting for me.
Anyways, these stories are more himself than anything else.  All stories and art and music is the creator in some way, but these are a psychological study more than anything else.  They are way more telling about Salinger's mental mechanisms than they are about anything else, I feel like.  And I'm not just saying it because of all the analyzing in his daughter's book.  I don't even really remember what she said, other than that she mentioned "Bananafish" a lot.  But if you're interested in Salinger's mind, I'd suggest it.  If you're kind of lukewarm on him, like me, you might not really be interested in this as much.  Salinger's style in these stories isn't nearly as grating as Catcher in the Rye, but I still got bored quickly.


Wow, long post.  I'm rereading Crabwalk, but I'm not going to write anything for it because I hate it even more this time around.  Oops...

(Also, spellchecker has decided to peace out for this post, so sorry if I missed anything.)