“I grew up loving and respecting short stories. They seemed to me to be the purest and most perfect things people could make: not a word wasted in the best of them. An author would wave her hand and suddenly there was a world, and people in it, and ideas. A beginning and a middle and an end that would take you across the universe and bring you back.” (Neil Gaiman, in his Introduction to Trigger Warning)

Nobody writes like Neil Gaiman.

A bold statement, and one that could be written with conviction about any beloved author.

Because the statement encapsulates a two-fold truism: each author has their own way of crafting the stories that occupy their head and heart, and each reader has their own personal encounter with the stories that captivate their imagination.

We all have our favorite authors, those whose skill–for any author whose work inspires high esteem could be said to possess some skill–and creativity combine to make their stories into the ones we cherish and hold closest to our hearts. Their ability to capture our affections could almost be described as magical for all the success we would have in defining just what combination of ingredients make their stories so potent.

Neil Gaiman is one of those authors, for me. I was hooked with Sandman and its many allusions to great works of literature, to mythology, and to the history of comics. But it was the novel Neverwhere that convinced me that Neil Gaiman had the uncanny ability to pluck story threads from the canvas of my daydreams. He was the first author I had ever encountered that gave me a feeling that a story had been written just for me.

He continues to do that to this day.

Perhaps you begin to see why I wrote that this is ostensibly a review of Neil Gaiman’s newest short story collection, Trigger Warning.

Continue reading Ostensibly a review of Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman →