This was one of the books given out for free during my publishing program. It’s one of the few I was genuinely excited about reading (others, like Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter I gifted to my boyfriend without reading).
But this collection of stories called to me. I have only read one of Neil Gaiman’s pieces, Coraline, and it was a long time ago (a long time before the movie came into being, I might add).
What we missed, what we wanted to read, were stories that made us care, stories that forced us to turn the page. And yes, we wanted good writing (why be satisfied with less?). But we wanted more than that. We wanted to read stories that used a lightning flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it before.
This is a quote from Neil Gaiman’s introduction to the collection. As I read through each story I found myself searching for each “flash of magic” and never had difficulty finding them. Of course, not all of the stories were great works of art. Some I had to struggle to get through because they were simply boring. One of these was Al Sarrantonio’s own story, The Cult of the Nose, which I found to be rather rambling and dull. It was a story about a guy who travels the world searching for some information on a make-believe cult of people who wear fake noses. The other was Stories by Michael Moorcock, a long narrative about a writer and other writers and how messed up they all are. It just didn’t say anything interesting and felt like he tried to combine stories of his own friends and put into a short fiction piece. This may or may not be the case, but it just didn’t fit with the rest of the stories and was boring in comparison.
There were, however, many really entertaining stories. Neil Gaiman’s The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains was a tale about a man on a quest. A very, very short man, on a very, very strange quest.
Blood by Roddy Doyle and Juvenal Nyx by Walter Mosley are both vampire stories, but very different from each other and from the Twilight-type vampire. In Blood, the vampire is merely a man who wakes up one day craving blood and decided to suck on raw pork chops and steaks. Juvenal Nyx is a more traditional vampire, made by another vampire and allergic to the sunlight.
Fossil-Figures by Joyce Carol Oates is a story about twin brothers, one evil, one not evil.
Wildfire in Manhattan by Joanne Harris is a story about greek gods who come to live among us in modern-day New York City. It’s better than it sounds, I promise.
Unbelief by Michael Marshall Smith is an amusing story about an assassin whose job it is to kill Santa Claus.
The Stars Are Falling by Joe R. Lansdale is a really great story about a man who comes back from war to see his wife is not as he remembers her and their son has no interest in knowing him. After a few failed attempts at normalcy, he begins to realize what has changed.
The Knife by Richard Adams is a very short story about a boy who decides to murder the head prefect of his house.
Weights and Measures by Jodi Picoult begins, “The loudest sound in the world is the absence of a child.” The story is how a couple deals with the grief of losing their only child to illness. It begins as a typical grief story, but soon strange things begin to happen.
Goblin Lake by Michael Swanwick was a really fun story about a man who is brought to the realization that he is a character in a book. When told, he is given the choice to stay in a chapter in which he is bedding a mermaid or to go on to the next chapter where he is old, married, and living on a farm.
Mallon the Guru by Peter Straub is a rather forgettable story about a man who enters a village to meet with a spiritual guru only to be welcomed as someone with powers of healing.
Catch and Release by Lawrence Block is a disturbing story about a serial killer fisherman written from his point of view. It’s really creepy, a little gory, and a tale of caution for women who are too trusting of strange men.
Polka Dots and Moonbeams by Jeffrey Ford is a confusing story. I spent most of it grappling for some sense of stability or realization, only to be left wondering. A couple goes to a fancy (albeit scandalous) club and are almost immediately offered a deal if they murder the concierge.
Loser by Chulk Palahniuk was a disappointment. A story about a college kid on acid who becomes a participant on a game show, it is riddled with Palahniuk’s usual “material possessions are ruining our lives” message. The story acts as a brief snapshot of an hour of time from the point of view of the tripping student as he realizes he doesn’t want his life to be simply an accumulation of ground beef and sports cars. It just didn’t tell enough of a story and relied too heavily on drugs as the reason for any interesting thought or image the student has.
Samantha’s Diary by Diana Wynne Jones was an interesting tale that takes place in the future. A successful model is harassed at Christmastime by an unknown admirer who continues to send her trees, birds, and eventually nine lords a-leaping. Her Housebot continues to answer the door and accept the gifts regardless of the reprogramming and her ex-boyfriend thinks the whole thing is hilarious.
Land of the Lost by Stewart O’Nan is a story about a woman who, left alone with her dog, decides to search for the body of a murdered girl she read about in the newspaper. Her grown children think she’s losing her marbles, but everyday she sets out to find the missing girl.
Leif in the Wind by Gene Wolf was a great space story of three astronauts who finish mapping a new planet and are about to return to earth when one of them begins to act very strangely.
Unwell by Carolyn Parkhurst and Parallel Lines by Tim Powers are both stories about old sisters who have a strong love-but mostly hate-relationship. In Unwell, one sister tells how she stole her sister’s husband and plans to do the same with her new one, while Parallel Lines tells the story of a dead sister who tries to convince a young neighborhood girl to let her ghost inhabit her body. Jealous, the living sister tries to keep it from happening.
A Life in Fictions by Kat Howard is a cute story about a girl who is her boyfriend’s muse, so much so that when he writes about her she disappears into his stories- literally. As time progresses, she begins to forget who she really is and the many characters based off of her become her.
Let the Past Begin by Jonathan Carroll was a really good story that ended too soon. It has great development, a great concept, but an ending that left too much to the imagination. Let the Past Begin is a story about a pregnant young woman who tells her two lovers a story about the silent child- a child who is born half-dead and half-alive and the mother can tell the future by touching the baby. The woman, Ava, tells her lovers what the woman foretold for her, but we never find out what happens. The story ends on a cliffhanger with some questions resolved, but others left open. I would have loved to read more about the silent child and Ava’s own child, but Carroll left me hanging.
The Therapist by Jeffery Deaver is a story about a therapist who believes that nemes, negative energy clouds, are what causes people to do terrible things. He believes it is his job to help people rid themselves of nemes. He sees a woman he believes to be filled with a neme, and he takes it upon himself to cure her of it.
Human Intelligence by Kurt Andersen is a story about an alien who has been living on earth for a very long time documenting what goes on for his own planet’s records.
The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon by Elizabeth Hand is a really good story about a man who lost his wife to cancer, his son he can’t control, two ex-coworkers, and a strange phenomenon that happened to an aircraft in 1901. It was very engaging, and the characters really became fleshed out by the end of the story.
The Devil on the Staircase by Joe Hill defies convention by taking the format of sentence staircases to match the title and plot of the story. For example:
“I was
born in
Sulle Scale
the child of a
common bricklayer.”
The story is about an Italian boy who works hard his whole life, carrying things up and down stairs, until he does a terrible thing which leads him to meet the son of Satan.
I wanted to give you an idea of the stories included in this collection without giving away endings, so I apologize if some of them were a little vague. In general, this was a fun collection to read and it was nice to take a break from the heavier fiction and read some lighter campfire-type stories.
Bent Shelf Book Reviews 