Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Neil Gaiman
be on the side of the good.
We are all the heroes of our own stories.
In this case, Sleeping Beauty . Which, seen from another direction, is also the subject of . . .
The Sleeper and the Spindle
Written for Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt’s anthology Rags and Bones, subtitled New Twists on Timeless Tales . They asked a few writers to create stories based on stories that had influenced us. I chose two fairy tales.
I love fairy tales. I remember the first one I encountered, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” in a beautiful illustrated book my mother would read to me when I was two. I loved everything about that story and those pictures. She read it to me, and soon enough I was reading it to myself. It wasn’t until I was older that I started pondering the stranger parts of the story, and I wrote “Snow, Glass, Apples” (in Smoke and Mirrors ).
I loved Sleeping Beauty too, in all her incarnations. When I was a young journalist I read a dozen thick bestsellers, and realized I could retell the story of Sleeping Beauty as a huge, sex-and-shopping blockbuster, complete with an evil multinational corporation, a noble young scientist, and a young girl in a mysterious coma. I decided not to write it: it seemed too calculated, and the sort of thing that might actually put me off the writing career I was hoping for.
When Melissa and Tim asked me for a story, I had been pondering what would happen if two stories were happening at the same time. And what if the women who were already the subjects of the stories had a little more to do, and were active and not passive . . . ?
I love this story more than, perhaps, I should. (It is now available in the UK as an illustrated storybook in its own right, pictures by the redoubtable Chris Riddell and at the end of 2015 in the U.S.)
Witch Work
When I was a child and read books of poems I would wonder more than was healthy about the person telling the story. I still do, even with my own poems. In this case there is a witch, and there is a watcher. This was also written as an apologetic gift for Jonathan Strahan, after I realized that The Ocean at the End of the Lane was turning into a novel.
In Relig Odhráin
This is a true story. Well, as true as any story about a sixth-century Irish saint can be. The churchyard is there, on Iona. You can even visit it.
I didn’t mean to write this as a poem, but the meter turned up in my head and after that I simply had no say in the matter.
They used to bury people alive in the walls or the foundations, to ensure that buildings remained standing. Even saints.
Black Dog
We first met Baldur “Shadow” Moon in American Gods, in which he gets caught up in a war between gods in America. In “The Monarch of the Glen,” a story in the Fragile Things collection, Shadow found himself a bouncer at a party in northern Scotland.
He is on his way back to America, but in this story has only made it as far as Derbyshire’s Peak District. (This was the very last of the stories in this book to be written and is, as they say on the book jackets, original to this collection.)
I want to thank my friends Colin Greenland and Susanna Clarke for taking me to the Three Stags Heads pub in Wardlow, which, cat, lurchers and all, inspired the opening, and to Colin for telling me that Black Shuck walked Trot Lane, when I asked him about black dogs.
There is one last story to be told, about what happens to Shadow when he reaches London. And then, if he survives that, it will be time to send him back to America. So much has changed, after all, since he went away.
VI. FINAL WARNING
There are monsters in these pages, but as Ogden Nash pointed out in my first short-story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, where there’s a monster, there’s also a miracle.
There are some long stories and some short ones. There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frightened, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by
We are all the heroes of our own stories.
In this case, Sleeping Beauty . Which, seen from another direction, is also the subject of . . .
The Sleeper and the Spindle
Written for Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt’s anthology Rags and Bones, subtitled New Twists on Timeless Tales . They asked a few writers to create stories based on stories that had influenced us. I chose two fairy tales.
I love fairy tales. I remember the first one I encountered, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” in a beautiful illustrated book my mother would read to me when I was two. I loved everything about that story and those pictures. She read it to me, and soon enough I was reading it to myself. It wasn’t until I was older that I started pondering the stranger parts of the story, and I wrote “Snow, Glass, Apples” (in Smoke and Mirrors ).
I loved Sleeping Beauty too, in all her incarnations. When I was a young journalist I read a dozen thick bestsellers, and realized I could retell the story of Sleeping Beauty as a huge, sex-and-shopping blockbuster, complete with an evil multinational corporation, a noble young scientist, and a young girl in a mysterious coma. I decided not to write it: it seemed too calculated, and the sort of thing that might actually put me off the writing career I was hoping for.
When Melissa and Tim asked me for a story, I had been pondering what would happen if two stories were happening at the same time. And what if the women who were already the subjects of the stories had a little more to do, and were active and not passive . . . ?
I love this story more than, perhaps, I should. (It is now available in the UK as an illustrated storybook in its own right, pictures by the redoubtable Chris Riddell and at the end of 2015 in the U.S.)
Witch Work
When I was a child and read books of poems I would wonder more than was healthy about the person telling the story. I still do, even with my own poems. In this case there is a witch, and there is a watcher. This was also written as an apologetic gift for Jonathan Strahan, after I realized that The Ocean at the End of the Lane was turning into a novel.
In Relig Odhráin
This is a true story. Well, as true as any story about a sixth-century Irish saint can be. The churchyard is there, on Iona. You can even visit it.
I didn’t mean to write this as a poem, but the meter turned up in my head and after that I simply had no say in the matter.
They used to bury people alive in the walls or the foundations, to ensure that buildings remained standing. Even saints.
Black Dog
We first met Baldur “Shadow” Moon in American Gods, in which he gets caught up in a war between gods in America. In “The Monarch of the Glen,” a story in the Fragile Things collection, Shadow found himself a bouncer at a party in northern Scotland.
He is on his way back to America, but in this story has only made it as far as Derbyshire’s Peak District. (This was the very last of the stories in this book to be written and is, as they say on the book jackets, original to this collection.)
I want to thank my friends Colin Greenland and Susanna Clarke for taking me to the Three Stags Heads pub in Wardlow, which, cat, lurchers and all, inspired the opening, and to Colin for telling me that Black Shuck walked Trot Lane, when I asked him about black dogs.
There is one last story to be told, about what happens to Shadow when he reaches London. And then, if he survives that, it will be time to send him back to America. So much has changed, after all, since he went away.
VI. FINAL WARNING
There are monsters in these pages, but as Ogden Nash pointed out in my first short-story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, where there’s a monster, there’s also a miracle.
There are some long stories and some short ones. There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frightened, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by
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