Fragile Things

Product Information

A boy can walk down the street and see a ghost in the lamplight or another can wake up and find himself in hell.

In a recent NPR interview with Gaiman, he stated that his enjoyment in writing children’s fiction stems from a belief that it is the most influential. Maybe the real world has made me too cynical or jaded, but what is meant to be scary or sinister seems here to be instead pathetic and old. They are all very unique and individual with a title that could be applied to a number of different short story books instead of this one. Gaiman seems to admire science fiction, horror, and fantasy, but his attempts to emulate them failed to engage me. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving.

But I do want to say that one thing I love about almost the entire collection is the interpretability of the stories. While Gaiman’s writing isn’t extravagant, the sleek simplicity of it makes it effective to captivate the minds of both the young and old alike. It was a kind of 'meh' story, and felt like it was trying hard to be portentous and scary, but wasn't.

The Flints of Memory Lane" (4 stars)- Just a short story about a young man remembering the time he came across something evil. A Locus Award winning collection of short stories and poetry that includes the Sherlock Holmes pastiche "A Study In Emerald". The members of an excusive epicurean club lament that they've eaten everything that can be eaten, with the exception of a legendary, rare, and exceedingly dangerous Egyptian bird.There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow endless drizzle.