Books & Poetry

This collection of short stories and poems by Neil Gaiman helps consolidate his reputation as one of the smartest and most individual of modern fantasists. He has the moral compass of Stephen King without the good-ol’-boy folksiness and the intelligence of Peter Straub without the obsessive perversity; he can be as funny as Pratchett and as dark as Barker, and can do both at the same time in a way neither of them quite can. What he also brings to the table is a remorseless fertility with odd ideas.

If you want to know what the really really rich do for sexual release, or what characters in Gothic novels put into their story-telling, or what happens to the characters in famous children’s books whose authors happen not to like them, ‘Fragile Things’ will leave you mildly disturbed by your own curiosity. At every point, what is important is not just the sheer cleverness of the ideas, but the way that those ideas get turned into lived human experience with tears and pain.

Gaiman has a childlike fascination with what comes next and what the secret is; one of the reasons he writes verse as well as screenplays and short stories and novels and comics is that they set him neat but manageable technical challenges. Solving them, though, is only half the game; it is cheating if you end up with something that does not matter to you deep down. The child in Gaiman is balanced by a weary adult who has found out the worst about things, and occasionally is pleasantly surprised.