Tag: neil gaiman

Micro Review: Fragile Things

I started listening to this audiobook around the time Vulture’s article about Neil Gaiman came out.

This book contains some of my favourite stories, not just by the author, but among all stories I’ve read and I remember, such as A Study in Emerald, which is probably my favorite fanfiction of both Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu mythos.

But the behaviour described in the article is so fowl I cannot in good honesty recommend the experience of listening to the author’s voice reading his own words after knowing of the accusations.

I’m no prude, I’m no judge, I’ve got my own opinions and I’ll bite my tongue and keep them to myself.

But I can say this felt like a punch in the gut. The folks over at Fumettologica (in Italian, use some translation service) have a very nice article on why this is so upsetting. We thought Gaiman was one of the good ones, this feels like betrayal (and I am in no way trying to say the fans’ feelings are comparable to the victims’).

Anyways, I’d suggest if you want to experience the stories, maybe get the Dark Horse collection via Humble Bundle, or pick the book at a library.

He’s rich enough and won’t suffer from this either way, but it may make your soul feel a bit better.

Micro Review: Trigger Warning

Some time ago I listened to Neil Gaiman’s short story collection Smoke and Mirrors and I liked it and thought I should read more like it. So I did, and I listened to Trigger Warning.

This collection is just as good as the other one: a few stories are fantastic, most are good, some are meh. It’s been a few months since I went through this, and like for most short story collections I have since forgotten most of them.

Still, I recommend it. There are occasional poems in it. Many stories refer or happen in worlds by other authors, so you may enjoy them more, or less, if you are familiar with the source material. But this is just normal for Gaiman stuff.

There’s also a short story where we meet again Shadow Moon, the protagonist of the (wonderful) novel “American Gods”. But somehow stuff happened to him between that novel and this short story. That’s cause there was another collection between this and the other one I read, and for some reason I skipped it.

It is one of the blessed rights of readers, to read books out of order.

Vote: 7/10, I need to get more of his other short story collections, possibly in order.

Micro Review: Smoke and Mirrors

This is the first collection of Neil Gaiman’s short stories.

I knew many of these already, having experienced them in various formats (I highly recommend you the Neil Gaiman Dark Horse comics collection on Humble Bundle) and I listened to this on Audible, read by The Author Himself.

He’s quite good at reading his own stuff.

Like many short stories collection, it’s a mixed bag: some are good, some are great, some are hard to evaluate, and some are just meh.

But it’s quite fun overall, and I would, and probably will, read it again.

Vote: 7/10, I need to get his other short story collections.

Micro review: The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I really enjoyed this book.

I like Neil Gaiman quite a bit, but this book felt somewhat different: it felt somehow like a Stephen King story.

Mild spoilers ahead.

The book is written as the main character, as an adult, visits the place where he grew up. There’s a pond there, but he knew, as a kid, that it was no pond, it was the ocean. And there was a girl, somewhat special. And a man, who killed himself.

See? Isn’t this your Kingesque coming-of-age/did-we-imagine-it-or-was-it-real plot?

It also feels pretty intimate, you are led to immediately visualize young Neil in the story, not a random kid. It’s a good book, well written, with a good story and characters.

And a big difference between King and Gaiman is that Stephen is not very good at endings, but Neil is great.

Vote: 8/10