For my viewing pleasure

In the last several weeks, I have

• Gotten halfway through S2 of The O.A.
• Watched all of the most recent season of Santa Clarita Diet
• Re-watched the first half and watched the second half of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Next up is to 

• Finish The O.A.
• Finish S12 of Supernatural (at which point I will have watched all twelve seasons in less than a year.  Yay?)
• Watch Hanna (on Amazon Prime)
• Wait impatiently for Good Omens
• Watch Red Riding Trilogy: Part 1: 1974

At some point I guess I should probably fold that huge mountain of clean laundry that is looming on the guest bed.

Desert Island Lists: Books edition

While I struggle to get my ass in gear with the rest of the True Blood recaps, let me pose this question to you:  What five books do you want with you when you're stranded on a desert island?  Series are acceptable with qualifications - finished ones like Harry Potter or unfinished like A Song of Ice and Fire (with the caveat that you get the next volumes as they come out) are fine but the complete works of Agatha Christie, for example, are not.  I'll start.

• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie
• The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

Now you, in the comments.  And put your thinking caps on because there are movies and television series to do in upcoming posts.  (Television is HARD!)

Dead Meat = DOA

Dead Meat would have been a perfect horror movie - 80 minutes long, set in Ireland, all about a zombie plague set off by a really bad mad cow disease infection - except that I hated it so much that I turned it off after fifteen minutes.  Maybe I missed out on something because quite a few viewer reviews have given it high marks, maybe I just wasn't in the mood for what little I saw.  The acting was bad.  It was poorly edited (I'm pretty sure we didn't need to see the whole of Whatshername's walk from the car to the creepy cottage).  Production values were way low and not in a good way, like the first Paranormal Activity or the first Blair Witch Project or even American Zombie.  The zombies started chomping on characters almost right away before I could even tell if I was going to like them or not, although I was pretty sure I wasn't.  I don't mind if the action starts right away but give me some reason to care.  I didn't care and so I turned it off.

Instead I watched Coraline, the wonderful, creepy, scary stop-motion animated movie version of Neil Gaiman's wonderful, creepy, scary book.  I just loved the book and I really liked the movie, which is voiced by a fantastic cast:  Dakota Fanning (Coraline), Teri Hatcher (Coraline's mother/Other Mother), Jennifer Saunders (Miss Spink), Dawn French (Miss Forcible), Ian McShane (Mr. Bobinsky), John Hodgman (Coraline's father/Other Father), Keith David (the Cat).   The movie is pretty scary and not for little kids (I don't quite recall but apparently the book is even scarier - I don't remember the thing in the basement that was so horrible but it doesn't make an appearance in the movie); it's got an extra-twisted Alice in Wonderland by way of Pan's Labyrinth feel to it.

Comic mini-review: Eternals by Neil Gaiman

I have made it my mission - a low-key, as-I-get-around-to-it mission, but still - to absorb in some form or another all of Neil Gaiman's works.  I love his writing, his worlds both familiar and oh-so strange, his embracing of old stories and gods, his creation of new beings and universes.  So far I have managed to watch Neverwhere, Mirrormask, Beowulf and Stardust, and read M is for Magic, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Fragile Things, Coraline, Black Orchid, The Graveyard Book, the Sandman series (click on the Gaiman tag over there on the right and it'll bring up all the reviews) and now, most recently*, Eternals. 

Eternals is a Marvel comic book written by Gaiman, illustrated by John Romita Jr. (who signs his art JRJR, which I rather like), a resurrection of an old and forgotten comic by Jack Kirby back in the 1970s.  The Eternals are not superheroes, although they have superpowers like superspeed, flight, transmogrification, mental telepathy, mad fighting skillz, etc.  They are not gods, although they have been around for a gajillion years and are ageless immortals.  They are another race entirely, set by their makers to keep and protect the Earth ... and most of them don't know who they are. 

So this is an origin story of sorts, as one of the Eternals, Ike Harris/Ikaris, sets about to gather the Eternals together, restoring their powers and their memories of who and what they are.  He finds the speedster, Makkari, who thinks he is "Mark Curry," ER doctor; Sersi, who can change matter's form and who is currently a party planner; Sprite, a puckish male Hannah Montana; and Thena the Warrior, married with a child and a job as head researcher for Stark Industries.

Yeah, that Stark Industries.  Iron Man has more than a cameo here, as do Yellowjacket and the Wasp (whoever they are).  The Marvel universe has a big presence in this book, which dampened my enthusiasm a bit - I'm just not that interested in superhero comics.  Another dampener for me is that there was just so much going on, it was overwhelming at times: a big cast and a twisty plot are fine, but the loads of exposition weighed things down.  Wave upon wave of giant alien robots, mutant demony critters, one Eternal thinking to take over the world one country at a time, another Eternal sabotaging his fellows, the Avengers trying to get the Eternals to sign on with them, dating throughout the millennia, how many ways can an Eternal not be killed ... I realize that all this is there to lay the groundwork for future stories, but it felt a little rushed. And not nearly Gaiman-y enough for my taste.

I didn't find the Eternals artwork to be anything special - although apparently Romita kept a number of the original Kirby elements in the characters' drawings while updating them out of the Seventies.  I just couldn't get excited about this book, and a couple of times caught myself turning pages quickly - never a good sign.  I'm sure it's a solid enough comic but I have come to expect more out of Neil Gaiman.  And, I'm afraid to say, that it's made me a little leery of all the other comics of his I have to read to accomplish my mission.  I do hope the others are more Sandman and less superhero.

* I'm halfway through Good Omens too.

Postscript: The Sandman

I did it.  I've come to the end of Neil Gaiman's amazing, horrifying, heart-rending, gorgeous series about Morpheus, Lord Dream of the Endless.  I haven't read a whole lot of comic books, but the people who write the forewards to each of the Sandman volumes have, along with a lot of other books, and they all say the same thing:  what Gaiman has created here is not merely a pop culture masterpiece, but fine art and literature.  The fact that Gaiman created a whole new mythology while interweaving myths and legends and fairy tales and stories from across the globe, the fact that these stories were released one book at a time, month after month, and yet by the end of it all the characters tie together, reconnect, even the ones whom the reader considered unimportant one-offs, the fact that the main character of these comic books is largely unlikeable and standoffish and yet moves through an incredible arc, compelling readers to return again and again, just to see what comes next ... I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again:

Neil Gaiman is a frickin' genius.  Even if you are sure you don't like comic books, you should read these.

Reading 'em is easier than writing about 'em

I read all these ages ago but have put off (and put off and put off) writing about them, and now they're due back at the library and I can't put it off any longer.  On the plus side, three out of four of these titles are series installments and there's not much more I need say about them.

Like, f'rinstance, Grave Peril, the third book in The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher.  As I've said before: urban fantasy with a touch of noir makes for a bunch of fun.  This time, Harry Dresden is battling a ghastly Nightmare that's stirring up all the ghosts in Chicago, plus he's got to duke it out with some seriously bad vampires.  It's all fun and games until somebody dies, of course.  I like this series; I like how the mythology builds; I like Harry's dry and self-deprecating narration; I've already got the next book, Summer Knight, queued up in my library list.

I'm drawing near the end of the Endless, sad to say, having just read Volume 7: Brief Lives and Volume 8: Worlds' End of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series.  (The library doesn't have Volume 6: Fables & Reflections which contained short, one-shot stand-alones, so narratively I didn't miss anything.)  In Brief Lives, Delirium convinces her older brother Dream to help her find their brother, Destruction, who abandoned their family and his responsibilities centuries ago.  Worlds' End is another stand-alone-ish volume where some major metaphysical event forces a bunch of travelers, from all worlds and all times, to take refuge at the Inn at Worlds' End.  There, they pass the time by telling each other stories, until a strange and awe-inspiring procession brings the story-telling to an abrupt end.  I was shocked and surprised at the reveal, and saddened, and now - with still three volumes left to read - I know I'm going to have to collect the entire series to have for my own.

The last book left to tell you about is One! Hundred! Demons!, a graphic novel by Lynda Barry which I think I read about on Whitney Matheson's Pop Candy blog.  This is an "autofictionalopgraphy," according to the author, taken from and inspired by Barry's life.  Each chapter is its own story, about a specific "demon" like "Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend," "Resilience," "Hate" and "My First Job."  The stories are touching, some funny, some pathetic; the artwork is primitive and colorful.  I much prefer comics like the Sandman series with sophisticated art and complex stories, but One! Hundred! Demons! was an interesting peek into one woman's brain.

I done read some books here

Despite my overweening excitement for the return of Heroes (she said in her most sarcastic voice), I’ve been reading quite a bit during the holiday hiatus. I don’t really have enough to say to merit separate reviews for each of the following, but here are the most recent items in a nutshell.

The Library kindly delivered up Volumes III, IV and V of The Sandman to me and I plowed through them voraciously. Volume III, Dream Country, is a standalone set of stories wherein Dream features tangentially instead of as the starring role. I liked it the least of the three, partly because of my personal preference for plot-plot-plot and these are just vignettes to flesh out the Endless’s backstories, partly because I had no idea whom the unnamed and rather grotesque character in “Façade” was – who, I learned from the Introduction, is an old comic book character –and thus didn’t really care about her, and partly because I really hated the captivity and abuse of the muse in the first story, “Calliope.” One very interesting thing about Volume III, however, is that Gaiman allowed his script for “Calliope” to be reprinted: he writes his comics like a movie, so the artist knows the images he’s going for; as you might imagine, Gaiman has very specific ideas and instructions on what should be happening in his stories.

Season of Mists is Volume IV in which, while at a family reunion of sorts, Dream is guilted into attempting to rescue his former lover, Nada, whom he had condemned to Hell some 10,000 or so years ago. When he gets to Hell, he discovers that Lucifer has shut things down, sending all Hell’s denizens away and handing the key to the locked gates over to Morpheus. Dream, of course, really does not want to be in charge of Hell, and soon has many offers to take it off his hands. Gaiman pulls in characters from all kinds of world myth, which I found great fun, while subtly insisting that no matter what pantheon you believe in, dreams rule us all.

Volume V is subtitled A Game of You and rejoins a character from The Doll’s House (Vol. II): Barbie, formerly married to Ken and now living in NYC. Barbie’s waking life is populated by colorful folks - a drag queen, a punk lesbian couple, a witch and the still-talking face of a dead guy – who end up attempting to rescue her when she is sucked wholesale into her dream life, where she is a Princess attempting to save her Land from the evil Cuckoo with the help of her talking animal friends. Here we see what happens when it is time for a dream world to end.

The non-Sandman book I read was A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire. This is the third book in the Wicked Years series, which began with Wicked, about the Land of Oz’s misunderstood Wicked Witch of the West, which I know I read, and continued with Son of a Witch, which I’m fairly certain I haven’t read. (I have read some of Maguire’s other tomes, like Mirror Mirror which, while a revisit of a fairy tale, is not Oz-ish.) This book, as the title suggests, follows the life of the Cowardly Lion. He did not spring up fully formed when Dorothy skipped by on the Yellow Brick Road but instead had a long and trying life: abandoned as a cub, snubbed by other Talking Animals, and cultivating a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time in his dealings with the people of Oz. This is his story, many layered and interweaving with all of the well-known citizens of Oz. However, I think I’m going to stop reading Maguire’s stuff because I always feel just a little bit left out. I am familiar with all the Oz stories – including the ones outside of the iconic movie as I read through my childhood library’s entire catalog of Frank L. Baum Oz books – but Maguire seems smug, like I’m not smart enough to be in on the joke. Maybe I’ll just go read the Baum books again when I get a hankering for over the rainbow.

Creepy comics

I may be a recent convert to horror movies but I've never found myself actively seeking out horror comics.  It has been much to my surprise then to find how horrific the comics I have been reading actually are.  Not Buffy, even with the vampires and werewolves and skinned Warren, but Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Volume Two: The Doll's House and Alan Moore's Swamp Thing: The Curse.

The Doll's House continues the fascinating and eloquent saga of Dream, Lord Morpheus of the Endless, as he continues to reassert his control over his realm.  He learns that four of his major dreams escaped while he was incarcerated: Brute and Glob, ogre-ish/gargoyle-ish tricksters; the Corinthian, a horrific nightmare with sharp-toothed mouths where his eyes should be; and Fiddler's Green, a peaceful, beautiful place.  Dream is not well pleased and heads out into the world to track these errants down.  His story, however, is not the main one of this volume: the focus here is young Rose Walker.  Rose is having a very interesting life of late.  She discovers a grandmother she never knew, loses and then finds her younger brother, and finally is shown to have some dream powers of her own, which eventually draws Morpheus to her.  His hunt for his missing dreams intersects with Rose's life rather dramatically, first interceding on her behalf when she finds herself in the middle of a serial killers' convention, then claiming her life as forfeit so as to save the world from chaos.  These are very dark stories here, involving child abuse, madness and, as I mentioned, a convention of serial killers.  There are all sorts of monsters in our lives, both in our dreams and outside of them, and Gaiman very skilfully draws them out into the light.

Swamp Thing: The Curse is a sophisticated little book too.  At first I resisted it, thinking it overly preachy as Swamp Thing did battle with a crazed and horrific individual called "Nukeface," who seeks out and imbibes nuclear waste.  (The stories collected in this volume were from 1985 and nuclear power was rapidly growing as a source for electricity and obviously on people's minds.)  Then, as I kept reading, Swamp Thing made the acquaintance of John Constantine (a/k/a "Hellblazer") who nudged him towards vampires (underwater ones, no less), zombies and a werewolf who was having a very bad day.  Horror classics to be sure but also, according to Constantine, the harbingers of Something Much Worse.  I'm afraid that I'll have to keep reading just to see what that something could possibly be.

More things read recently

I don’t know what my deal is, exactly – I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff but just haven’t been revved up to write about any of it with any sort of conviction. It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed or been interested by what I’ve been reading. I guess I’ve either been distracted by the new job and all the new things to do in this new city, or lazy. Could be either one, really. Anyway, this is what I’ve consumed lately.

Saga of the Swamp Thing (Book 1) and Swamp Thing: Love and Death (Book 2) by Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. I picked this up because in one of the forewards to one of Neil Gaiman’s comics, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing revitalization was raved about as one of those seminal, game-changing comics that arose in the 1990s. And you know me, I’m all about jumping on a good thing way after the fact (and am fortunate that the SLC City Library has a great selection of comics and graphic novels, including Swamp Thing). I will admit that I don’t love Swamp Thing the way I do the Sandman, and most of the reason is that the illustrations seem old-fashioned to me, pulpy, more comic-y and less art-y. I do like the depth of story, however; I think Moore is a terrific writer. I also liked the crossover with the Sandman stories in Love and Death with Cain and Abel, and Etrigan the Rhyming Demon [note: I’m assuming that Gaiman picked up these Moore characters but I read the Sandman first, so that’s my chronology]. I’m interested enough to see where Moore goes with this series, so I’ll probably pick up the next couple of Books.

The Sandman: Endless Nights is a collection of seven stories, one for each of Dream and his six siblings: Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Destruction and Delirium. Each story is, of course, written by Neil Gaiman but is illustrated by a different artist –Craig Russell, Miguelanxo Prado, Milo Manara, Barron Storey, Glenn Fabry, Bill Sienkiewicz and Frank Quitely, with longtime Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean having a creative hand in the book design. This is a gorgeous book. The stories of the Endless siblings are fascinating, giving all sorts of backstory to the Sandman series while existing as a standalone volume. The art is incredible, varying wildly depending on the artist and ranging from classic comics style to elegantly drawn portraits to crazy, trippy collages. I’ve read it through twice now and I think I’ll probably read it again before I have to give it back to the Library.

As promised in my review of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, I also recently checked out Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, Vol. 1. I must have read this before, decades ago, but I honestly can’t remember if I have. Everyone knows the story from the Disney cartoon: young boy lost from his village, raised by wild wolves, befriended, defended and taught by Bagheera (black panther – my favorite character), Baloo (big ol’ bear) and Kaa (gigantic python) … well, everybody should read the original Kipling version instead. It’s magnificent - elegant, violent and musical (don’t skip the poems in between the chapters). And now, after reading both The Jungle Books and The Graveyard Book so close together, it is readily apparent what a loving homage Gaiman’s book is to the 1895 original, even to the point of the language being a respectful and eloquent echo. Wonderful and accessible tale, even 100+ years later.

Book review: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Are y’all sick of my Gaiman obsession yet? Well, that’s just too bad because I am in no way tired of him yet and dude’s prolific. I just finished one of his most recent YA novels, The Graveyard Book (published in 2008), and it’s wonderful.

The Graveyard Book is the story of Nobody Owens, commonly referred to as “Bod,” a boy who was raised from babyhood by an ancient graveyard when his parents and older sister were murdered. As the evil man Jack was dispatching his family, the one-year-old baby toddled out of his house and into the graveyard, where the resident ghosts, spirits and revenants took him in as one of their own. With Mr. and Mrs. Owens (dead “for a few hundred years now”) as his erstwhile parents and Silas, a vampire, for his guardian, Bod grows up healthy and happy – so long as he doesn’t leave the protection of the graveyard. For outside, in the human world, the man Jack still lurks.

There are eight chapters to The Graveyard Book, each of them detailing a specific adventure in Bod’s life as he grows from toddler to teenager. He makes a new human friend; he explores a haunted barrow; he balks at his lessons and encounters ghouls; he tries to fulfill a long dead witch’s last request; he attends human school when the graveyard ghosts can no longer teach him. And when he learns what happened to his first family, he wishes for revenge.

Gaiman acknowledges that this book owes a debt to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the story of an orphan, raised by a nonhuman family, who makes his way back to the human world. It’s been decades since I’ve read these volumes and now I think I’d like to revisit them. But Gaiman puts his own unmistakable touch on the old story, adding his dark, intelligent humor and imagination, elements of suspense, magic and the macabre, bits from folklore and fairy tales, making The Graveyard Book a story that is very much his own. I wish there had been more than eight chapters so we could have had more than eight glimpses into Bod’s childhood.

Graphic novel review: Black Orchid by Neil Gaiman

My exposure to comic books/graphic novels has been fairly limited. I’ve got a BtVS Season 8 subscription; when I have extra cash, I buy the trades for Y: the Last Man and Fables, trying to collect each complete series; I’ve got my copy of Watchmen, of course. But I don’t know much about the traditional costumed heroes*. So it was with slight trepidation that I picked up Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Black Orchid from the library. (I’d actually hoped to start his Sandman series, but the first five volumes were already checked out and it didn’t seem to make sense to start with VI.) Black Orchid it was, then.

Right off the bat it was clear that this was not your normal comic book, particularly since the main character, the heroine of the piece, gets murdered within the first few pages. And not in a kill-Selena-Kyle/awaken-Catwoman sort of way. This is the superhero herself, shot, burned and then blown to bits in a huge explosion. Well, huh, I thought, where do we go from here?

Where we go, where Gaiman and McKean (longtime collaborators on numerous projects) take us, an amazingly creative and ultimately hopeful place. When the crime fighting costumed superhero Black Orchid is killed, some of her consciousness makes its way back to the greenhouse from whence she came, and awakens one of her sisters growing there. She wasn’t entirely human, you see, but a human/plant hybrid created by a slightly mad scientist when her human progenitor, Susan, the love of his life, was murdered. The orchid-woman who awakens isn’t exactly the same as the Black Orchid; this new one abhors violence, seeks – both literally and figuratively – her roots and tries to find purpose in this life that was thrust upon her so abruptly.

Many men** affect her life as she makes her journey: Susan’s sleazebag ex-husband, Carl, just released from prison; Lex Luthor – always looking for the next big thing, and thinking that human/plant hybrids might be it – and his minions; Phil Sylvian, the scientist who created the orchid-women … and with these men violence follows.

But the ending of the book is a surprise – more so even than killing off your heroine right from the get-go – and a departure from comic book tropes that finds resolution in giant, bloody battles. I’ve read that people were surprised when the story ended like this, certain that one more chapter was forthcoming wherein the bad guys would get what was coming to them and the Black Orchid would be avenged. Not here, not in Gaiman’s hands. Here there is compassion and faith and hope.

Dave McKean’s artwork is like nothing I’ve ever seen in a comic book. Lush, atmospheric and dreamy while at times nearly photorealistic, the colors and images swirling and fading into each other … it is actually art. Anyone who scoffs that comics cannot be art (or literature) should immediately sit down with this book.

In the articulate introduction by Mikal Gilmore, senior Rolling Stone writer, it is noted that “… in the world of comic books – as in the worlds of film, literature and global politics – any story that begins in violence must necessarily also end in violence.” In Black Orchid Gaiman has proven that this is not necessarily so in comics and thus gives us hope that it might not be necessary in our lives either.

* Although I now know more than I used to, having recently read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, review coming to a friendly mouse blog soon.

** She also meets up with many famous and infamous comic book characters: Batman and Swamp Thing, as well as the Joker, Harvey Dent, the Riddler and Poison Ivy during a trip to Arkham Asylum. This is probably a treat for full-on comics nerds but I had to look most of them up on Wikipedia just to figure out who they were. Still, a nice touch connecting the world of the Black Orchid with the larger costumed superhero universe.

Book review: Coraline by Neil Gaiman

In my quest to work my way through the catalogue of the prolific Neil Gaiman, I’ve sampled some of his movies, adult novels, short story collections, YA short story collections and graphic novels (to date, just Black Orchid, review coming to FMS soon). Coraline is the first children’s novel of his that I’ve read: it’s not a picture book, but it’s a little easier to get through than his YA stuff. That being said, Coraline is scary.

Coraline Jones lives with her parents in a flat in part of a big old house. They share the old house with the denizens of the other two flats: the crazy old man in the attic flat, who tells Coraline that he’s training up a mouse circus; and the Misses Spink and Forcible, aging actresses, with their sundry aging terriers. The big old house has a ramshackle garden around it and many rooms to explore in it, which is a good thing since Coraline’s parents, who work at home doing things on computers, all but ignore their daughter, too wrapped up in their work. The neighbors aren’t that much better: they pay attention to Coraline but can’t manage to get her name right. She reminds them (to no avail): “It’s Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline.”

The Jones family flat has twenty-one windows and fourteen doors – Coraline counts them all one bored day. The fourteenth door is locked, however, and when she finds the old iron key and opens it, she finds a brick wall. Until she tries it again later and finds a passageway into another flat. This other flat is in another house that is very similar to Coraline’s house. There’s even another mother and another father who feed her things that she likes to eat and show her another bedroom with crazy toys. But as much as she initially likes it there, Coraline realizes that there is something wrong with the other mother and the other father, not just that they have black buttons where their eyes should be. The other parents want her to stay and live with them, there’s just something they need to change first …

There’s also the matter of the other children, the ones that were trapped in the house by the other mother so many years ago that they are only ghosts, hiding in mirrors now. Coraline is the only one who can rescue them, if she can figure out how to outwit the other mother with her terrible long fingers and snaky black hair, and the rats who do her bidding.

There is no question that Coraline is a scary story – I was a little scared and I’m thirty-something forty-something old a Stephen King fan. The other mother is scary, the rats are nasty, the thing in the basement that I’m not going to talk further about is totally creepy. But Coraline is a sensible, clever girl and she keeps her wits about her, and that is what children will connect with. I would imagine that Coraline would be a good book for children and parents to read together (although perhaps not right before bedtime), but I can tell you from experience that it’s a treat to read by yourself as an adult as well.

Book review: Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

As mentioned before, I tend to read and/or watch things in clumps, like three Terry Pratchett books in a row or all of Gossip Girl S2 in a mad marathon. The current clump is Neil Gaiman. Man’s a genius, I am completely convinced of it. I took three of his volumes out of the library last week - a book of short stories, a YA novel and a graphic novel – and read the short stories first.

Fragile Things is comprised of thirty-one “short fictions and wonders,” some stories, some poems. As with all of Gaiman’s work that I have experienced, these pieces are each part horror and part fantasy, with a little whimsy thrown in for leavening. I think my favorite of the bunch was "The Monarch of the Glen," which takes place several years after American Gods and follows Shadow’s adventures in Scotland. In the introduction to Fragile Things Gaiman remarks that he “enjoy[s] the gulf between Angelina Jolie’s portrayal of Grendel’s mother in the Robert Zemeckis film [the script for which Gaiman co-wrote] and the version of the character that turns up here.” Some of the other stories are:

• A Study in Emerald – an alt-universe in which both Sherlock Holmes and alien overlords coexist
• Closing Time - a ghost story with a twisty ending that I had to re-read a couple of times
• Bitter Grounds – of course there are zombies in New Orleans!
• The Problem of Susan – in which Gaiman addresses what happened to Susan from the Narnia books
• Goliath – originally written for the web site for The Matrix, and posted just before the film came out

I love short story collections (another of my admittedly none-too-highbrow favorites, Stephen King, does some of his best work in short stories) and read one of Gaiman’s YA short story volumes, M Is for Magic, at the end of last year. I’d forgotten this, however, and so was completely perplexed when some of the stories in Fragile Things seemed so familiar, and yet other stories didn’t. Three of the M is for Magic tales are also in Fragile Things: "October in the Chair" (a ghost story told by October), "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" (a science fiction-y piece) and "Sunbird" (about "a group of people who like to eat things").

Although none of these stories demonstrate anything startlingly new, Gaiman continues to charm and entertain and I have no reason to think that the next book in my queue, Coraline, will turn out any differently.

Book review: Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

The first stories were Tiger’s stories and they were stories of hunting and rending and teeth and blood. The world was a hard place then, and it hurt. Then Anansi, the Spider, the trickster, came and fooled Tiger, stole the stories away from him. And the people learned that life was full of song and dance and laughter, and even if it was hard, there was joy in it too.

Returning to the world he explored in American Gods, Neil Gaiman’s 2005 Anansi Boys is full of song and joy and laughter, and is a very good story indeed. “Fat Charlie” Nancy grew up perpetually embarrassed by his laughing, practical joke-loving dad. When, after years of estrangement, his father dies, Fat Charlie goes to the funeral and discovers that (1) his father was actually a god and (2) he is not an only child. If you want to see your brother, says the old West Indian woman who was Fat Charlie’s childhood neighbor, tell a spider. One night not too long afterwards, after a bottle of wine, Fat Charlie mentions offhandedly to a garden spider that he’s rescued from his bathtub that his brother should stop by.

So his brother does. Handsome, charming, lucky and fully aware of the benefits of being a god’s son, Spider descends upon Fat Charlie’s humdrum life and wreaks ample havoc upon it: seducing Fat Charlie’s fiancée, discovering financial inconsistencies at work which makes Fat Charlie’s shady boss nervous, getting Fat Charlie arrested, starting a cascade of events that lead to murder, séances and a trip to the West Indies. Fat Charlie is alternately fascinated and appalled by his brother but must concede in the end that his life is perhaps better – or at least more exciting – for having Spider in it.

Gaiman has done it again with Anansi Boys, weaving ancient folklore and modern storytelling with the greatest of ease. This is a lighter-weight book than American Gods, both in heft of subject matter and physical size (in fact, my only complaint was that it ended too soon – where it should have, story-wise, but I could have read twice the allotted pages because Gaiman is just that good). Instead of taking on all the old religions that built the United States, Gaiman this time focuses on the charming and devious “Mr. Nancy,” and what happens when a god’s child doesn’t know his godhead.

Part British police caper, part West Indian voodoo, part Douglas Adams-esque insanity, part folktale, Anansi Boys is great fun, great storytelling and, at the very least, completely identifiable to anyone who has ever been embarrassed by or frustrated with a family member. If all stories now belong to Anansi, then there is no question in my mind that Neil Gaiman is absolutely one of his boys.

Book review: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

America is a vast country with room for many. Inhabited by Natives and settled by peoples from across the globe, the continent embraces its people and the beliefs they bring with them, seeking solace and livelihood and freedom. It's a good thing the country is so goshdarn big because the people came from all over - from Scandinavia to Africa, from Ireland to India and all the places in between. They brought their gods and their demigods, their faeries and ifrits and boggles. The people brought their old gods and the land welcomed them, allowing them to settle and flourish. Until the people got a little more sophisticated and newer gods began to make themselves known: telecommunications, electricity, transportation, television. The old gods retreated in the face of modernity. And then they fought back.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman is the story of the battle of these gods - and the man caught in the middle. Shadow is about to be released from doing his three years in prison when he is told that his wife Laura has been killed in a car crash. Bereft, travelling home for her funeral, he meets a charismatic grifter named Wednesday. Wednesday knows all about Shadow and offers him a job as sort of an aide de camp. Figuring why not, Shadow accepts.

Wednesday is more than he appears to be, however, and so is the rogues' gallery of his confederates to which he introduces his new employee: Mr. Nancy (Anansi), Czernobog, Whiskey Jack, Easter (Eostre) - all gods making their way in a now-hostile world. On a wild roadtrip through some of the U.S.'s more memorable roadside attractions (like this and this), Shadow finds himself entangled in an epic struggle that he had no idea was happening.

This is my kind of book, no question about it. As a kid I plundered the school and town libraries, reading (and re-reading) every mythology book I could get my hands on - Norse, Greek, Egyptian, Native American, Celtic, African. I devoured those stories. And now, finally, the stories have all come together in Gaiman's uber-capable hands. As I turned the pages of American Gods and discovered a different god - or an oblique reference to a different god - I had such fun trying to recall what I might still know about thunderbirds, Thoth, Anubis, Bast and Horus, Kali, Morrigan, kobolds, Urd's Well and Loki. (By the way, each of these deities play a role in this big book - and that's not all of them!)

I loved this book. Loved it, loved it, loved it. Devoured it. Reread pages because they were so good. Got cranky when I realized I was nearing the end. In fact, I would venture to say that I had the exact opposite reaction to American Gods as I did to that friggin' stupid Mermaid Chair book. It's not all gods and monsters - Gaiman is nearly poetic about road-trips and small towns, and there's a murder to be solved - but while this is clearly fantasy, it doesn't have that swords-and-sorcery feel to it. American Gods reads easy like a straight-fiction thriller ... it just happens to be about, well, gods and monsters.

Book review: M Is for Magic by Neil Gaiman

The popular opinion is that Neil Gaiman can do anything and everything he puts his mind to: adult fiction, youth fiction, poetry, screenplays, regular plays, comics and graphic novels. M Is for Magic is a collection of short stories that will delight both young (the intended audience) and old (like me) readers.

Part horror and part fantasy, these eleven short stories are both slightly familiar and brand new, fairy tales for now. One of the stories, "The Witch's Headstone," is expanded upon in Gaiman's newest children's book, The Graveyard Book; the story that grabbed a-hold of me and currently refuses to leave my brain is called "The Price" and is about a stray cat who defends his adoptive human family from Something Very Bad. The other stories are:

• The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds - a noir nursery rhyme
• Troll Bridge - a boy meets a troll under a bridge
• Don't Ask Jack - a creepy little tale about a creepy Jack-in-the-box
• How to Sell the Ponti Bridge - a fantastical scam story
• October in the Chair - a ghost story told by Hallowe'en's month
• Chivalry - the most miraculous things can be found in secondhand shops
• How to Talk to Girls at Parties - the most science fiction-y of the lot, but poetic too
• Sunbird - in Gaiman's own words, "a group of people who like to eat things"
• Instructions - an excellent little poem that seems to sum up all the stories that preceded it

I have decided to make it my mission to really delve into all things Gaiman, seeing how I have enjoyed what I've discovered thus far (MirrorMask, Neverwhere, Stardust and now this book here). Fortunately, I have a lot ahead of me - he's some wicked prolific, he is - and I'm setting my sights on Coraline (the book before the new movie), the Sandman comics and The Graveyard Book next.

MirrorMask - movie review

It is entirely possible that Neil Gaiman is a genius - either that or he is extremely unbalanced, which is not mutually exclusive, I realize. I come to this revelation having recently watched Mirrormask, a gloriously trippy movie written by Gaiman and directed by David McKean. A quest story along the lines of The Wizard of Oz and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this Jim Henson Company collaboration is an incredible fusion of live actors, puppets and CGI, so interwoven that at times – most times – it was difficult to tell one from the other.

Teenaged Brit Helena is a performer in her parents’ little traveling circus. Although the circus is shown as a dazzling place, infused with color and warmth, Helena is sick of it and just wants a normal life. One evening she has a fight with her mother who later collapses and is rushed to the hospital with a brain tumor. Helena spends days stuck in a dreary flat, covering her bedroom walls with fantastical pen and ink drawings and waiting for word on her mum’s condition. On the night her mother goes into surgery, Helena is restless and seemingly unable to sleep, sick with guilt over the nasty things she said to her mother. She hears music and wanders out into an alleyway that leads her into another world.

Convinced she is dreaming, Helena is unafraid of what she finds: bizarre and yet friendly people and creatures – all wearing masks - lurching and scuttling out of startling landscapes, going busily about their days. She meets a young juggler named Valentine who is initially put off by the fact that she does not wear a mask like the rest of the populace (“How do you know what expression to wear without a mask?”). He warms to her, however, when he learns she too can juggle and they set off together. Helena is soon captured by the White Queen’s people who fill her in on the current situation: this land she has wandered into, which is divided into Light and Dark, is now unbalanced because the Dark Princess (a twin of Helena) stole the balancing charm which sent the White Queen into a magical sleep, allowing the Dark to encroach upon the Light unimpeded. Helena, who likes to be useful, decides that her quest will be to retrieve the charm and restore balance to the lands.

During the course of Helena’s quest, she meets all kinds of fantabulous creatures: flying books that sulk if you give them a bad review; riddling sphinxes; floating stone giants; creepy, skittering one-eyed spiders who are spies for the Dark Queen; doppelgangers (both the evil Dark Queen and the comatose White Queen look like Helena’s ailing mother; the prime minister looks like her dad); and my favorites, a flock of Bobs (and one Malcolm) who seem to be a cross between gorillas and pigeons. The creatures and the landscapes are twisted marvels, all angles that don’t make sense and patchwork body parts. Nothing is nightmarish in that Helena (and likewise the viewer) is never really scared; everything is nightmarish in that this is clearly nowhere normal. Gaiman’s boundless imagination is lovingly interpreted and rendered by the production staff. The acting isn’t much to write home about but the sheer spectacle of the whole is wondrous.

After watching the entertaining but decidedly low-budget Neverwhere a while back, I was slightly skeptical about delving deeper into Gaiman’s catalog, anticipating more charming amateurishness. I needn’t have worried: the production values for Mirrormask have skyrocketed in comparison to little Neverwhere and this film is a sight to behold. I would venture to say that Mirrormask is a must-see for fantasy-lovers and I am planning to hurry to my comics shop to see if the book version is as much of a treat as the movie. But first I’m going to watch this very cool flick again.