2006; 355 pages. Full Title : Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders. New Author? : No. Genre : Anthology; Fantasy. Awards : 2007 Locus Award for Best Collection. Overall Rating : 6½*/10.
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A collection of 31 Gaiman-penned short stories, poems and one novella, all of which were published previously. There are aliens and vampires, horror and humor, sock monkeys and Scheherazade, Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft. The latter are paired in a single story.
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What's To Like...
A slew of twisty tales from the fertile mind of Neil Gaiman. These aren't Gaiman rejects - four of the stories won Hugo or Locus Awards. Some are light-hearted, others dark. A few bordered on being lewd, which was a new side of Gaiman for me. The introductions to each one, containing background on why he wrote it, are really interesting.
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The Best of the Bunch...
October In The Chair - The 12 months meet to tell themed stories to each other, and tonight, October tells a ghost story. Beautifully done. My Life - A bit of prose written to accompany a picture of a sock monkey. A great example of Gaiman's storytelling skills. Feeders & Eaters - A cannibal romance. The Day The Saucers Came - Just how many things can go wrong on the day the world comes to an end? The Monarch of the Glen - A mini-sequel to American Gods, with Shadow going to Scotland.
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Kewl New Words...
Kedgeree : a dish of rice, hard-boiled eggs, and flaked fish. Guying (vb.) : making fun of. Foeter : a rotting mess (I think). Cachinnation : loud, convulsive laughter. Scatty : rattlebrained. Frottage : rubbing the body against another person for sexual gratification. Bowdlerize : to remove material from a book to make it less vulgar or offensive. Scumble : to soften the colors or outlines of something. Bifurcated : divided into two parts. Tachyon (adj.) : technically, of a hypothetical subatomic particle that travels faster than the speed of light. But here it was "tachyon swans". Tontine : a form of life insurance where, on the death of a participant, his share is destributed to the remaining members of the group. Bothy : a small, primitive hut out in the countryside, left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge.
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Excerpts...
"The brides!" came the whisper from beyond the door, and it redoubled and resounded until it seemed to her that the very house itself throbbed and echoed to the beat of those words - two syllables invested with longing, and with love, and with hunger.
Amelia bit her lip. "Aye. The brides. I will bring thee brides. I shall bring brides for all."
... And then one ghost voice hissed, "Yes, and do you think we could get her to throw in a side order of those little bread roll things?" (pg. 59-60)
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"I was never much of a one for cats," he said suddenly. "Not really. I liked dogs. Big, faithful things. You knew where you were with a dog. Not cats. Go off for days on end, you don't see them. When I was a lad, we had a cat, it was called Ginger. There was a family down the street, they had a cat they called Marmalade. Turned out it was the same cat, getting fed by all of us. Well, I mean. Sneaky little buggers. You can't trust them." (pg. 224-225)
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"We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again." (pg. 266)
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But where does cantagion end and art begin? (pg. 267)
Like any anthology, Fragile Things has its gems and its paste, and two readers might disagree on which stories are which. Like all short stories, character development and plot depth are sacrificed for the sake of a quick-moving tale. It is no coincidence that the crown jewel here, The Monarch of the Glen, is also the longest story - 54 pages in length.
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Fragile Things won't supplant whatever is currently your favorite Gaiman book, and some of the "rawer" stories and language may not be to everyone's taste. This is definitely not a book for the kiddies. If you've never read a Gaiman book, don't start here. Yet every reader will find some of the stories to be really good, and for those Gaimaniacs among us, this is a worthy collection. 6½ Stars.
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