I feel really bad about this, but I didn’t love this collection of stories — I liked a few of them, but most of them left me feeling kind of meh. I feel like I’m betraying one of my favorite authors by saying so, but I’m sure he’ll survive. I did, however, love the final short story, which featured one of my favorite characters — Gaiman-created or otherwise — of all time.
“I wonder, Are fictions safe places? And then I ask myself, Should they be safe places?”
As Gaiman warns in his introduction, the stories in Trigger Warning really don’t have any kind of common theme. I didn’t expect that to really bother me, but halfway through the book I felt like I had been bounced around so much that I couldn’t keep track of anything that I’d read. Maybe if I have just read a story at a time and spaced it out then the variety of themes would have been less jarring. I did really like some of them — the calendar one was cute, and the horror story about the Click-Clack was great — but most fell sort of flat. I did like how he introduced each of them — getting the story behind the story always intrigues me.
And then the last short story features Shadow, from American Gods. I love Shadow (I love that whole universe), and even though this shows just a snippet of his life, it’s a great story and a good addition to Shadow’s canon. I would give Black Dog and the Click Clack story 5 stars; the rest manage about a 1 or 2 — so let’s call it 3 stars overall.
