When I was a kid, I was scared of my bathroom because I thought a monster lived behind the shower curtain. The movie “Tremors” made me believe that a giant mutant worm from outer space was going to come through the floor and eat me. I closed my door every night before I went to bed because I just knew something lurked in the hallway outside (it was the same thing that lived behind the shower curtain, incidentally). As an adult, I am scared that I […]
Smoke and mirrors are more useful than you think
This was my second anthology by Neil Gaiman, and at first I had to check that this wasn’t the same as the first one. There are four stories toward the beginning that are also in M is for Magic (“Chivalry,” “The Price,” “Troll Bridge,” and “Don’t Ask Jack”) , so if you would like my opinion on those you can go here. The first thing that surprised me was that the introductions for the stories were all in the beginning, instead of before each […]
This will look good on my trophy necklace.
“The Secretary of Defense stood at the front of the room giving the most important PowerPoint presentation in human history. […] The fate of all mankind rested on the decisions that would be made in this room in the next few minutes, so of course PowerPoint wasn’t working. […] ‘It doesn’t really matter which dimension you’re in Mr. President, Windows still does that. There’s even one Earth where Bill Gates’s cyborg head is God Emperor and they’re still forced to use Vista.’ ” In a […]
I want to say I excpect more from Gaiman, except when it comes to his short stories I don’t really.
Trigger Warnings is a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman, I believe his third collection. It’s a pretty meh collection, practically all of the stories were forgotten the moment I turned the page. I find this to be true of most of his short stories if I’m honest, I like (and occasionally love) his novels, but his short stories generally leave me cold. That this collection is so bland is rather ironic considering the tittle. Before I get into the actual stories, I do […]
The night is dark and full of terrors
I found this through Scalzi’s big idea series and immediately put it in my library request list. The list of contributing authors is heavily weighted to my recent favourites, not to mention that I always love dark reinterpretations of fairy tales. This was an awesome collection, starting strong and ending great (and the physical book is gorgeous with lovely internal illustrations, I’ll be buying my own copy). There was a good representation of countries as well as a nice mix of modern retellings with more […]
Wicked Tales
The cover of this book has a quote from a review in Independent that sums up these nine short stories better than I ever could: “If this collection can be said to have a clear uniting theme, it might be that by a certain stage of life we’ve all got at least one person we would really like to kill”. That’s…pretty much perfect. “What is a stromatolite? he asks rhetorically, his eyes gleaming. The word comes from the Greek stroma, a mattress, coupled with the root word […]