Well, it’s a first for me to give anything Neil Gaiman has written less than four stars, but I’m reminding myself that according to Goodreads’ rating system, that means “I liked it.” And I did! Some of the stories were delightful and magical, and terrifying. But some of them didn’t really work for me, for one reason or another, and overall, it was actually harder to pay attention to the stories, or work up enough energy to dive back into the book, knowing I’d have to start all over again with my level of engagement each time there was a new story.
I frequently have that kind of reaction to short story collections, so I suppose I shouldn’t really have been surprised, but I had hoped that by listening to the audiobook, I’d be able to overcome that reaction. And maybe I actually did, who knows. Maybe I would have had an even harder time getting through it reading via hardcopy.
Maybe it’s just that a lot of the stories that I found it difficult to motivate myself to listen to were of the more ethereal variety, where language and stylistic experimentation were the forefront, rather than the storytelling or cheeky wit that is my favorite part of Neil Gaiman’s writing. (This is perhaps also why American Gods is my least favorite of his novels.) It’s harder to pay attention to language via audiobook, but the more straightforward stories were just like I hoped they’d be via audio, like someone telling you a story just before bedtime in a lovely, gravelly British voice.
Standouts for me were “Orange” (a funny story in the form of answers to a questionnaire), “The Case of Death and Honey” (Gaiman does Sherlock Holmes), “Click-Clack the Rattlebag” (a short, horrifying story that is simple and wonderfully scary, with a truly excellent title), “An Invocation of Incuriosity” (a longer story about some strange stuff that just really worked for me), “Nothing O’clock” (a Doctor Who story that I’d read before as part of the Eleven Doctors, Eleven Stories 50th Anniversary collection), and “The Sleeper and the Spindle” (a sort of fairy-tale mash-up with a Gaiman twist). I enjoyed “Black Dog,” the American Gods follow up novella, and also the only original piece of fiction to the collection, but it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.
All in all, the experience of reading this was a success, but I think I might check out future Gaiman short story collections in hard copy.
