Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Neil Gaiman
HarperAudio
Fiction, Collection/Fantasy/Horror/Poetry/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: The months of the year meet to trade stories over a campfire... a mysterious circus proves to be more than it appears... a club of gourmands seeks the ultimate rare delicacy... a man witnesses proof that his reality is not as it seems... These and more tales and poems are related in this collection of stories from modern master Neil Gaiman.
REVIEW: I've mentioned in previous reviews that I find Gaiman a bit hit-and-miss; I can appreciate what he does, but his stories aren't always my cup of cocoa. This is also not the first time I've seen a couple of these; his mashup of Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft, "A Study in Emerald", I've previously read in another anthology, and the poetic short story "Instructions" has been spun off into a picture book (which I haven't specifically read, but have seen go through the sort at the library shipping center where I work). From those two examples alone, one can infer that there's a broad range of tones and potential target audiences in this collection. As usual for Gaiman, the ideas are always imaginative, and even when the tales weren't quite to my taste they were well executed. In an introduction, he explains the inspirations behind most of them, though part of me wished he'd related them closer to the stories in question; in an audiobook, one can't exactly flip back and forth to an opening section as one reaches a story. The American Gods novella, "Monarch of the Glen", lost some context for me since I haven't read that novel, but stood alone well enough to be understood. Overall, it's a decent collection of tales, even if some of the endings are deliberately ambiguous.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Odds Are Good (Bruce Coville) - My Review
Fifty-One Tales (Lord Dunsany) - My Review
The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman) - My Review
No comments:
Post a Comment