Fragile Things

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I have to say I don't enjoy horror stories. But his “horror” is like, um, like a delicate, philosophical horror. Almost sweet. I don't know if that even exists, but that is how I see it. Some stories gave me the chills, sure, but at the same time, I felt a wave of sorrow and a feeling of understanding, empathy. Loneliness moves the world, for better or for worse. It all feels like a desperate attempt to release a collection of unrelated stories into the world. They are all very unique and individual with a title that could be applied to a number of different short story books instead of this one. A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night, taking one of the spectators along with it.

October in the Chair" (5 stars)-This was a great story involving the months as we know them coming to life and telling stories. October in the Chair" is a story in which the months of the year tell each other tales. October tells the others about Runt, an overlooked and miserable boy who runs away from home and meets a ghost. I don't know if I want to talk about the stories individually, except to say that I don't think there's any that I actively dislike, though I'd have to say that Harlequin Valentine is probably my least favorite. But I do want to say that one thing I love about almost the entire collection is the interpretability of the stories. They all have layers that just work so beautifully together, and you can see them in the way that makes sense to you.

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Stories, Neil Gaiman informs in the introduction, are fragile things made up of 26 letters (more if you want to use phonetic symbols), ink and paper. They are illusions created by things that cannot last, but the best stories survive and transform. The stories within this volume are perhaps some of those best stories. Those with a taste for inventive idiosyncracy will find themselves fully rewarded.”— San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

Good Boys Deserve Favors" – inspired by a statue by Lisa Snellings-Clark of a man holding a double bass Goliath" is a story set in the fictional universe of the Matrix, in which a very tall man is taken from the matrix to pilot a ship to fight aliens. Almost a year ago I was having a wonderful time in the Philippines. Several good things came out of this, including a contest for fiction and comics... Fortunately, the Milk…is a children’s book, heavily and beautifully illustrated by Chris Riddell, which tells the whimsical tale of a father’s journey around the world. I admire a person who can say so many things, that can share complex thoughts and mixed emotions with simple words:I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds. She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy. We were partaking of one of our landlady's magnificent breakfasts one morning, when my friend rang the bell to summon that good lady. "There will be a gentleman joining us, in about four minutes," he said. "We will need another place at table." Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders is a collection of short stories and poetry by English author Neil Gaiman. It was published in the US and UK in 2006 by HarperCollins and Headline Review. It feels a little mean putting this at the bottom but, honestly, Neil Gaiman has never written a flat-out bad book. I also read this book at the age of 23, knowing that the target demographic is very young children.

A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night, taking one of the spectators along with it . . . There were 2 poems and many great short stories in here. I think this is his best collection of stories I’ve read so far. I think I have read them all so far. The Monarch of the Glen – a novella-length sequel to Gaiman's novel American Gods inspired by Beowulf and set in remote areas of Scotland However, flaws aside, American Gods still comes out on top thanks to its big ideas and its setting.

Such marvelous creations and more—including a short story set in the world of The Matrix, and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children's fiction—can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman's storytelling brilliance as well as his terrifyingly entertaining dark sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most unique writers of our time.

So, yes, Coraline is scary. It tells the story of the titular Coraline, a girl who moves to a new house with her parents and comes to lash out and rebel a little. She is lured into a mirror world where seemingly kinder versions of her parents exist to welcome her, but all is not what it seems. Bitter Grounds' is a traveler looking for another life, and finds one as an anthropologist who studies zombies. It was a kind of 'meh' story, and felt like it was trying hard to be portentous and scary, but wasn't. I like the first paragraph and the phrase, "In every way that counted, I was dead"--a fantastic opening line. 'Other People' is a short-short I'm sure I've read before, perhaps in a mythology book; the idea feels like a chance to explore the concept of pain and hell more than anything else. 'Keepsakes and Treasures' has nothing worth keeping, and is twisted and unpleasant on a number of levels. The plot surrounds the development of a murderer as he finds employment under an obscenely wealthy man, Mr. Alice. It's one of the stories where none of the characters are likeable or redeemable. 'Good Boys Deserve Favors' (title taken from a mnenonic for learning music) is an ode to a bass that I presume the author played as a young boy, and is a little too short to feel quite as mystical as it wants to be. Coralineis a children’s book that adults can enjoy just as much. This is thanks to Gaiman understanding that stories are universal, and that what is scary for children is also often scary for adults. As a boy I had loved Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton stories, in which dozens of characters from fiction were incorporated into one coherent world, and I had greatly enjoyed watching my friends Kim Newman and Alan Moore build their own Wold Newton–descended worlds in the Anno Dracula sequence and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, respectively. It looked like fun. I wondered if I could try something like that. Keepsakes and Treasures" is told by Smith, a bad man who works for an even worse man called Mr. Alice, who always gets whatever he wants. In this story, Mr. Alice pursues and buys one of the Shahinai, a mythical group of people who survive by selling one of their extraordinarily beautiful men every hundred years. Mr. Alice and Smith appear again in "Monarch of the Glen," in which Shadow, a character from the novel American Gods, is forced to fight Grendel. Shadow refuses to kill the creature, and manages to turn the tables on Mr. Alice.

One story was inspired by a Lisa Snellings-Clark statue of a man holding a double bass, just as I did when I was a child; the other was written for an anthology of real-life ghost stories. Most of the other authors managed tales that were rather more satisfying than mine, although mine had the unsatisfying advantage of being perfectly true. These stories were first collected in Adventures in the Dream Trade, a miscellany published by NESFA Press in 2002, which collected lots of introductions and oddments and such. CLOSING TIME I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.