Three Short Stories

To top off my Neil Gaiman reads for The Dream King Challenge, I decided to read a few short stories which are available online.

I'm not going to tell you much about these three short stories by Gaiman. A taste is all you shall receive, a little piece of temptation which will hopefully inspire you to click on the story name and read the stories for yourself.

Cinnamon - A princess, whom none can make speak, has a life changing talk with a tiger. Mentioned at A Striped Armchair;

I Cthulhu - Also known as What's A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9' S, Longitude 126° 43' W)?, I Cthulhu reads like the journal entry (technically a speech to a subordinate) from a powerful being that came to Earth literally in the primordial sludge. And two awesome quotes:  "...born of nameless nightmare parents" and "Riot and revel, blood-food and foulness, eternal twilight and nightmare and the screams of the dead and the not-dead and the chant of the faithful."

How to Talk to Girls at Parties - Two boys wind up at the wrong party with unusual girls. Vic, a more alpha male, is good with the ladies, but our unnamed narrator is a bit shy. As Vic says, "They're just girls...they don't come from another planet." But he could be wrong. Reviews:  Gripping Books;  

Now...go read.

Interworld

Title: Interworld
Author: Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves
Published: 2007 Pages: 239
Genre: YAL, SFF

Plot Synopsis
Joey Harker, a normal boy, stumbles into another dimension, and so begins his journey, fraught with peril, as a Walker. The other Walkers are Other Joeys from various worlds in the Altiverse, and as if that isn't enough for Harker to contend with, the army of magical beings wants to boil him up and use his soul as fuel.

My Thoughts
I love the premise for the fight in this book.  It isn't good versus evil; it is science versus magic, and they are both evil. Each side wants to conquer and control the gazillion other worlds, pushing each to one side or the other. The good guys belong to a understaffed, underprepared, oddly young group of Walkers, who are committed to ensuring the balance between science and magic in all the worlds of the Altiverse.

The premise of the Pendragon series is eerily similar, and I found myself thinking about this similarity while reading (I reviewed books 1-8 in the series in May and June).  In Pendragon, the lead character is not leaping through various versions of Earth, but in fact is going to entirely different worlds, but still both main characters are walking through wormholish thingamabobbers in order to fight an entity/group that wants to control all worlds.  And of course both are mid-teen males who have the whole reluctant hero thing going on.

My favorite character in this book is not the lead, but rather Jai, an enigmatic sesquipedalian (logophilia baby).  Every sentence he utters is like taking a trip through a thesaurus. Afterall, "What good is a vocabulary that isn't used?  My second favorite character is Hue, a blob of somethingoranother that communicates through color changes.  My third favorite...okay, I liked the characters.

The story is quick, moving from action-sequence to action-sequence with less reflective abstractness than is typical in Gaiman; in other words, the story didn't make me contemplate any deep universal truths like with American Gods, Anansi Boys, the Sandman series, or Good Omens. But it was just what I needed to keep my attention for a nighttime read-a-book-in-one-sitting-marathon.  I quite liked the story in general.  I want sequels, a whole series, and the door is wide open for future books.  Alas, no plans on that front.

Memorable Scene: Joey's first walk into the In-Between was a setting I will remember. I loved imagining this world which made me think of dropping acid while taking a ride through some strange combination of Disney World's Pirates of the Caribbean and It's a Small World and simultaneously having someone read Edgar Allen Poe's poetry to you. Yep. (Note: I have never dropped acid.  And I don't even know where I would drop it if the chance ever came.  Seems like something you'd want to hold onto being all expensive and everything.)

Memorable Quote:  Commence our intradimensional excursion.  I can so picture Spock saying this. 

The Graveyard Book

Title: The Graveyard Book
Author: Neil Gaiman
Published: 2008 Pages: 307
Genre: YAL, SFF

Plot Synopsis
The man Jack failed in his mission to kill the boy, lost him in a graveyard, which is where this boy stays.  Called Bod, short for Nobody, this boy lives between worlds, a graveyard where strange beasts live in deep hills, ghoul-gates guard other worlds, and young girls come to play. But Bod is alive and belongs in the world of a living, a place he can not go because some still want him dead.

My Thoughts
I caved.  I completely, utterly, and uncontrollably caved.  I had promised myself - no buying books.  I have more books in my TBR pile than most have in their homes, so I was determined to get through a large chunk of them before buying a book.  But everywhere I turned, there were wonderful reviews of this book. And I thought, well it does count for like three of my challenges, and I do so love Gaiman, and then I caved.  Just this one book, I promised myself.  Then at the bookstore, three other books managed to jump into my hands...but more on that later.  Back to this book.

While many gushed compliments like the Las Vegas Bellagio Fountains, my compliments are a bit more tempered.  I enjoyed the book, absolutely enjoyed it, but when it comes to Gaiman, I'm a bigger fan of American Gods, Good Omens, and the like.  As a rule, I enjoy 'adult' books more than 'kids' books. 

The Graveyard Book, a kid's book, tells a wonderful story in a unique setting with memorable characters.  I felt a part of the graveyard community, found myself wanting Freedom of the Graveyard, and more than anything I wanted to know more....more, more, more.  The mini-plots and adventures ended too soon and begged for more detail, the characters cried out for further exposition; I wanted backstory, mini-plots rich in detail and action, intricate weavings of history and present.  In other words, I wanted something that isn't a kids book.  I do think it is a mark of a master creator for a book to capture me so intensely that I don't want it to end, that I am unsatisfied with what I've been given.

Question:  Do you find yourself disappointed with books that made you want more or do you find this a mark of a good read?

Memorable Scene: *PLOT SPOILER* I can't get the end scene out of my head.  The image of Bod leaving the graveyard in burned in my mind.  It is a moment bittersweet and yet filled with such potential.

Memorable Quote: You're always you, and that don't change; and you're always changing, and there's nothing you can do about it. ~ I love the seeming contradiction in this quote; it's obviously perfectly correct and perfectly contradictory at the same time.

The Sandman: Dream Country

Title: Dream Country
Author: Neil Gaiman
Published: 1995 Pages: 112
Genre: Graphic Novel

My Thoughts
Dream Country contains 4 disturbing stories: Calliope, A Dream of a Thousand Cats, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, and Facade. Plus, Gaiman has included his script for Calliope which gives us insight into Gaiman's writing process on this particular story.

Calliope was difficult for me to read. Artfully done and intriguing, the story features a young author who comes into possession of a muse (who used to date...is that the right word?...Dream) and uses her to become rich and famous. That is not the difficult part. The author rapes the muse. And not only do we read about it: "She's not even human, he told himself. She's thousands of years old. But her flesh was warm, and her breath was sweet, and she choked back tears like a child whenever he hurt her." But since this is a graphic novel, we also get to see it. Rape is so abhorrent to me that I dislike seeing it in books or films.

A Dream of a Thousand Cats freaked me out with its focus on the possibility of dreams. In it, a group of cats listen as one cat tells them about their power to change the world, to re-elevate cats over humans, through a mutual dream. I find cats terrifying; I find the images in this story stomach-clenching. The illustrators manage to create visuals of cats that are at once familiar and highly other. It may have been my favorite of the collection.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titiana and Auberon arrive as guests of Dream to watch Shakespeare and Company present A Midsummer Night's Eve. I loved the layers of this story, the intricacy of a play about fairies being shown to the real fairies. And who doesn't love Puck?

Facade features Urania Blackwell, a lonely woman, altered by Ra, able to change her physicality but unable to fix her destroyed face. She uses masks to hide her disfigurement but is still primarily a solitary figure. Death reappears in this story, as an unexpected consolation.

The novel read like a collection of short stories, not as linked as the first two novels were, but still each individual tale contributes to the feel of the world created in The Sandman. I'm excited to read the rest of the stories.

A collaborative project from fantasy masters Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. We follow a series of characters as their stories intertwine as the appocolypse fast approches. Angel Aziraphale and Demon Crowley make an interesting team. They have both been living on the world for thousands of years and have grown rather attached to it. They don't really want the war between the angels and demons to take place so both risk going against the ineffible plan by trying to sort out the mess.

It all starts when the Antichrist is born and is switched into a human family. Crowley is in charge of making sure the switch goes to plan, but he doesn't bank on incompetant Satanic nuns. The baby grows up in the wrong family and Hell begin to question Crowley when the Hellhound arrives and Crowley can't find where it went. Into the mix comes Anathema Device, a descendent of Agnes Nutter a prophetess whose predictions have always come true. Anathema is trying to stop the appocolypse as well as she rather likes her life. The other human getting caught up in divine events is Newton Pulsifer who has sort of fallen into being a Witchfinder. Can the elements all come together in time to stop the Four Horsemen of the Appocolypse fom ending the world and bringing on the war to end all wars. Question is, if the war happens what will the angels and demons do next?

A fun read. It feels like Pratchetts writing and Gaiman's ideas a lot of the time. They worked well together, I personally prefer Gaiman's slightly darker side to Pratchett's more comic fantasy, but this will definitely appeal to Pratchett fans as well. I would love to see what else they could come up with as a writing team, but it seems highly unlikely at this point sadly.

Anansi Boys

Title: Anansi Boys

Author: Neil Gaiman

Published: 2006 Pages: 384

Genre: SFF

Rating: 4/5

Plot Synopsis

"Fat Charlie" Nancy is a wholly unremarkable person living a rather unremarkable life until his no-good father dies, who by the way was/is a god. Then he meets his brother, his charming, self-absorbed, magical brother, and suddenly Fat Charlie's life is full of cantakerous witches, assassin birds, angry gods, and embezzlement.

My Thoughts

I think I should have given this time to simmer. I don't mean the whole book; I mean the pieces. I picked up the 384 page book at 7pm Sunday night - the start of the Bears game, which I am really not interested in but the hubby likes it - because I was feeling guilty after my Sunday Salon post where I realized I had not read a book in 11 days. Instead of reading for an hour or so, I finished the entire book, closing up around 10:45. Now, my thoughts on this book are a jumbled mess, but hopefully writing this review will help!

Anansi Boys shares a character with American Gods: Mr. Nancy. First off, I loved American Gods. As I said in my review, "American Gods is an oddly non-philosophical story regarding a paradigm shift. What I mean is that the plot is a plot, not a theoretical monologue about the significance or the importance of the action, but a story that readers can philosophize about or not as they see fit. There is deep meaning and an almost but not quite subtle reflection on contemporary theology, but at its foundation, American Gods is a good story." I did not get this from Anansi Boys; it was almost the opposite. I liked, but was not overly fascinated with, the plotline (two unsimilar brothers and a complex father-son(s) relationship) or the characters (original and interesting but lacking depth). What I was fascinated with was the philosophy. Anansi Boys, more than anything else to me, is a discussion of the importance of stories to humans.

One of the primary threads throughout the novel is the conflict between Tiger and Anansi. Originally the stories told by humans were Tiger's, and "back then the tales were dark and evil, and filled with pain, and none of them ended happily". Then Anansi comes along and he steals the stories from Tiger through tricks and wit. When Tiger's stories were being told, humans lived just to survive, but with Anansi's humans began to think, to be more than instinct. I find the idea of stories directing human thought and behavior fascinating. I teach literature and film, which are primarily aimed at understanding how ideologies are communicated through print and visual media - in other words, how stories shape humanity.

Along with the philosophy of the book, I also loved the language, which to me was very Douglas Adams-esque. For instance the following:

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the case, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world work, with no regard for individuals or for propriety.

As always, writing a review really did help the chaotic mess inside my head. For a more clear perspective, read the other reviews! Or better yet, read the book!

Coraline

Title: Coraline

Director: Henry Selick

Starring: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher

Release: February 6, 2009

Country: USA

Genre: Animation, Adventure

Rated: PG

First Viewing: August 11, 2009

Plot Synopsis

A young girl finds a secret door to an alternate version of her own reality...a better version. Her other parents are more attentive, her other neighbors more interesting, and her other home more exciting. But in the end this other life is too good to be true.

My Thoughts

I love Neil Gaiman whether it's books, graphic novels, or films. His visions are a dreamscape, Lucy is in the sky with diamonds and plasticine porters have looking glass ties. The visuals draw the viewer into the world of imagination and terrify just as they delight. Every image seemed imbued with feeling, and while always intriguing, I would not say that these feelings were always comfortable, which makes me doubt the claim that this is a children's story. I guess it all depends on how you define "children". In my opinion, younger viewers or more immature viewers may find the film more scary than fun.

I read Coraline not too long ago and loved it. The film did not disappoint. As with all book to film adaptations, changes were made, but they did not detract from the essence of the story. In the end Coraline is still Coraline. My only regret is that I did not get to see the film in 3-D. I may have to find myself some glasses and rewatch the film.

Rating: 4/5