In this second collection of short stories from Neil Gaiman, each tale offers a semblance of the everyday, with a final sting that pulls back the wool from our eyes to reveal the mundane underscored by the fantastic.
A 1970s punk house party becomes a gathering of beautiful and terrible aliens, a Victorian playhouse is the gateway to a place from which no one returns, and an elderly boarding house neighbour is revealed as a terrifying woman with the gift of keeping things alive as she eats them. Interspersed with snatches of poetry and pieces such as the intriguing Strange Little Girls — vignettes that are not quite poetry but are all very nearly tiny stories in themselves — this book is a delight. One never quite shakes the feeling that if you didn’t turn the page each tale could go on telling itself and might just, even if we aren’t looking.
Gaiman is bound by the credo of telling stories, as he explains in the enlightening introduction, and many of the pieces here, such as The Problem of Susan and October in the Chair, are studies in storytelling, and the problems of storytelling and myth-making. The introduction gives a short run-down of the history behind each tale, and itself contains yet another little gem, The Mapmaker. Whether you read the intro before the stories or after them is up to you. For me, leaving it until after I had finished the book worked beautifully.
One of the best parts of the collection is the final tale, Monarch of the Glen, which picks up on Gaiman’s much-acclaimed novel American Gods. Readers again meet Odin’s son Shadow, two years on from the events that saw his ancestry revealed in the novel. Present too are the marvellously wicked Smith and his boss Mr Alice — one of the men who truly controls the events of the world. As in American Gods, the reader encounters the leftover myths and legends, the gods and creatures that still cling to existence in the world, neatly juxtaposed with the god-like, very real and extremely unmagical personage of Mr Alice. It’s wonderful little loops like these that reveal Gaiman as a master of his art, and leave you desperate for more.
