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Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions

Neil Gaiman

It's fitting that I started reading this book on the flight over to the UK, and will be finishing it here.  Or rather, it just fits.

Neil Gaiman, known best for his graphic novels (Sandman, etc) and full-length novels like American Gods and Stardust, can really tell a story.  And in this book, he tells not one, but 30 'short' tales (including one hidden in the introduction!) that range from a 100-word story about a fictional figure we all know (and most of us love) to an account of Mrs. Whitaker, who finds the Holy Grail underneath a fur coat at a secondhand-goods store.

I say that the book fits, because almost all of the settings take place in England.  The few that haven't so far have instead involved British folks visiting the US.  Either way, Neil Gaiman is able to imbue his characters with lives of their own, complete with joys, worries, trials and tribulations. 

Not all of the stories end happily; as Neil puts it, "sometimes the only way I would know that a story had finished was when there weren't any more words to be written down".  But the stories (in some cases, masquerading as poems or fictional excerpts of the work of a famous historical writer) all have the power of a great storyteller behind them.  I have yet to read one that does not invoke a strong emotion in me, be it the whimsical fancy of a man who "cures" cancer but provides some interesting side effects with his solution, or the despair and determination of the man who spends most of his life searching for a girl he once saw in a Penthouse magazine when he was nineteen.

I picked this book up from the bookstore on a whim, to round out the balance on a gift certificate.  I am a fan of short stories, but had no knowledge of Gaiman's short-fiction writing abilities prior to just digging in to the book.  I'm glad I chose it, and will gladly purchase any future compilation of short stories he chooses to publish, without question.

Just to give you a small feel for Gaiman's style in these stories, I'll point out a small excerpt from the story "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", wherein our protagonist has his first alcoholic drink ever, and does some gazing into the depths of H.P. Lovecraft's soul:

Ben shook his head.  He seemed to be discussing literature with two strangers in an English pub while drinking beer.  He wondered for a moment if he had become someone else, while he wasn't looking.[...]

Ben was mildly surprised to find that he seemed to be drinking another full-bodied pint of Shoggoth's Old Peculiar.  Somehow the taste of rank goat was less offensive on the second pint.  He was also delighted to notice that he was no longer hungry, that his blistered feet had stopped hurting, and that his companions were charming, intelligent men whose names he was having difficulty in keeping apart.  He did not have enough experience with alcohol to know that this was one of the symptoms of being on your second pint of Shoggoth's Old Peculiar.

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