Monday, April 2, 2018

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman


A collection of stories - most of them have been published somewhere earlier. Due to the number of the stories, I am not going to review all of them. As a whole, the collection was very good as can be guessed (is there anything by Neil Gaiman which isn’t at least fairly good)?
Some of the more memorable stories were “That Thing About Cassandra”, which tells a story of a teenage boy who made up a girlfriend - only to have her contact him years later with memories of encounters he invented for his peers. The ending was a kind of surprise.
“The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains..." is a very good story of a sweet revenge of a father whose daughter was killed.
“Nothing O'Clock” was Dr. Who “fanfiction”, which was very well done and would have worked nicely as a very creepy episode.
“The Sleeper and the Spindle“ was a modern, a bit feministic take on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale with some Snow White thrown into the mix. Another excellent story.
The final story, “Black Dog“, happens in the universe of “American Gods” and was slightly slow to start, but was excellent by the end.

As a whole, in spite of a few more uninteresting stories, it is a very good collection.

311 pp

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