Fragile Things Book Review
Fragile Things:
Short Fictions and Wonders
Neil Gaiman
Morrow, 360 pp., $26.95
Reviewed by Elizabeth Willse for the Star-Ledger
Section: Perspective
Date: 10/22/06 Word count: 315
Probably best to get your copy of “Fragile Things” before Halloween. Neil Gaiman’s latest collection is full of strange and spooky tales, good for October’s gray nights.
The prolific Gaiman is best known for the “Sandman” graphic novels, but his novels and short fiction have received critical acclaim as well. “American Gods” won various awards for fantasy fiction in 2002, and a previous short story collection, “Smoke and Mirrors,” won the 1999 Bram Stoker award.
For those new to Gaiman’s particular brand of macabre whimsy, “October in the Chair,” the second story in the volume, serves as an introduction. Twelve deftly personified months of the year gather to swap stories (October tells a ghost story), munching on roast sausages and chestnuts.
Gaiman uses the story-within-a-story device again in “Closing Time,” where the characters tell each other tales in the Diogenes Club, and again in “Feeders and Eaters,” in which the narrator learns the grisly truth behind a friend’s haggard appearance.
Gaiman, who cowrote the screenplay for the upcoming “Beowulf,” enjoys rearranging the classics. In “The Monarch of the Glen,” Grendel and his mother are fussy guests at a Scottish bed and breakfast. The phoenix arrives as a delicacy chased by gourmands in “Sunbird.”
A couple of the pieces are disappointing. “Strange Little Girls” reads like unvarnished notes, and “Diseasemaker’s Croup” and “A Study in Emerald” are too fantasy-world esoteric. But overall, “Fragile Things” is a lovely, spooky, autumnal volume.
