Fragile Things

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I had some hesitation, not to read it but certainly in prioritizing it, after I'd read Smoke and Mirrors a couple of years ago.

As previously mentioned his first paragraph verges close to plagiarism in how it replicates the feel of another Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet. I really enjoyed a few then there were others that just left me feeling confused as the story didn’t seem to do anything. I like his ability to effortlessly maneuver his readers right into the position we need to be in for maximum effect, and when we get there, he flips everything, so we're left wondering just what happened and how we got where we are when obviously we were just on our way to somewhere else. My Life”; "Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot”; "Feeders and Eaters”; "Diseasemaker's Croup”; "In the End”; “Goliath”; "Pages from a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky”; "How to Talk to Girls at Parties”; "The Day the Saucers Came”; “Sunbird”; "Inventing Aladdin"; The Monarch of the Glen.The Problem of Susan" (5 stars)- Disturbing as anything, but it does give a different perspective as what became of Susan Pevensie and why she turned her back on all things Narnia. Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.

With THE SANDMAN Neil Gaiman created one of the most sophisticated, intelligent and influential graphic novel series of our time. Diseasemaker's Croup' was mildly interesting, but not a fitting read for a hypocondriac, and 'Goliath' just missed me entirely. 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. 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.

This helps highlight Gaiman’s pervasive idea of the power stories hold while also allowing him to bring the reader into the story at a safe distance before shocking them.

I especially enjoyed Gaiman’s way of affecting a sense of a ‘story within a story’ where he puts near equal emphasis in the context in which the story is told as in the actual tale much like Henry James does in The Turn of the Screw, or Nikolai Gogol does to exemplify the oral tradition of storytelling. Earlier this fall, after hearing him speak on NPR, I sat down with a copy of Coraline, and hungrily read it in one sitting. In a novella set two years after the events of American Gods, Shadow pays a visit to an ancient Scottish mansion, and finds himself trapped in a game of murder and monsters . Strange Little Girls" (2 stars)- Just seemed to be listing different attributes certain women take on. But this is a mostly almost-horror collection of short story ideas rendered in a not particularly clever way, and I often had the feeling I was reading bits and pieces of autobiography tucked into larger tales.The Problem of Susan– this story was written in response to the character Susan in Narnia and also how children's fiction came to be. I found myself speaking to the characters (talking alone to some pages, from a sane person's point of view).