The Neil Gaiman Reader

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Foreword by Marlon James
Preface
We Can Get Them for You Wholesale (1984)
“I, Cthulhu” (1986)
Nicholas Was . . . (1989)
Babycakes (1990)
Chivalry (1992)
Murder Mysteries (1992)
Troll Bridge (1993)
Snow, Glass, Apples (1994)
Only the End of the World Again (1994)
Don’t Ask Jack (1995)
Excerpt from Neverwhere (1996)
The Daughter of Owls (1996)
The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories (1996)
The Price (1997)
Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar (1998)
The Wedding Present (1998)
When We Went to See the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside, age 11¼ (1998)
The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch (1998)
Changes (1998)
Excerpt from Stardust (1999)
Harlequin Valentine (1999)
Excerpt from American Gods (2001)
Other People (2001)
Strange Little Girls (2001)
October in the Chair (2002)
Closing Time (2002)
A Study in Emerald (2003)
Bitter Grounds (2003)
The Problem of Susan (2004)
Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire (2004)
The Monarch of the Glen (2004)
The Return of the Thin White Duke (2004)
Excerpt from Anansi Boys (2005)
Sunbird (2005)
How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2006)
Feminine Endings (2007)
Orange (2008)
Mythical Creatures (2009)
“The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .” (2010)
The Thing About Cassandra (2010)
The Case of Death and Honey (2011)
The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury (2012)
Excerpt from The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013)
Click-Clack the Rattlebag (2013)
The Sleeper and the Spindle (2013)
A Calendar of Tales (2013)
Nothing O’Clock (2013)
A Lunar Labyrinth (2013)
Down to a Sunless Sea (2013)
How the Marquis Got His Coat Back (2014)
Black Dog (2015)
Monkey and the Lady (2018)
Honors List
Credits
About the Author
Also by Neil Gaiman
Copyright
About the Publisher


Foreword
Thanks to Neil Gaiman, spiders now stop me dead in my tracks. This is a truly weird turn of events, worthy of one of his novels, that now, instead of trying to shoo them away or smash them, I stand frozen, and wonder if this eight-legged brother is about to tell me something that it’s been trying to share since before the slave ships. Something that I’m only now ready to hear. I would explain more, but that would turn this into a foreword for just one novel, Anansi Boys, when this collection is so much more.
Besides, what brought me here was not spiders, but Tori Amos. This already sounds like the line of a ’90s song, and the line I’m writing about is from 1992, and is actually hers: If you need me, me and Neil’ll be hanging out with the Dream King. The lyric clearly means something to Amos and to Gaiman, but it meant something else to a young obsessive of them both. By that time, I had been reading Neil’s work for years. But that one line made me think Amos had done something else. She went into his work and found herself. I remember hearing that song and thinking, “So I’m not the only one who believes in Neil’s world more than my own.”
I still think I live in Gaiman’s world more than my own. For us maladjusted misfits, an escape to his worlds was all that enabled us to endure ours. I would say that Gaiman creates the kind of work that begets obsessions, but that seems too easy. All great art has its devotees, but Gaiman, particularly for other writers and oddballs, regardless of genre or art form, gives us permission to never let go of the world of wonder that we’re all told at some time to leave behind. Of course, the best writers know this is a scam—there is no fantasy world standing opposite the real world, because it’s all real. Not allegory, or fable, but real.
Which might explain why I devoured American Gods when it came out in 2001, a year that badly needed an escape into fantasy. Except that escape was not what it gave me. The novel proposed something way more radical: the idea that the forgotten gods were still around, adjusting quite badly to their twilight, and just because we no longer believed in them didn’t mean that they had stopped messing with us. And it wasn’t just the continued machinations of gods, but the continued importance of myths. After all, a myth was a religion once, and a reality before that, and myths still tell us more about ourselves than religion ever could. Neil Gaiman is a mythmaker, but also a dream restorer. It never even occurred to me that I needed a character to be rescued from simply being relegated to folklore, until he took the stuff of childhood rhymes, half-forgotten, and gave them living, breathing, combative souls. Then he threw them into a present that they weren’t always ready for, and certainly wasn’t ready for them.
This collection abounds in fantastic beasts, normal people with weird powers, weird people with normal struggles, worlds above this one, worlds below, and the real world, which is not as real as you might think. Some stories travel through strange realms in three pages. Some don’t end so much as stop, and some don’t begin so much as pause and wait for you to catch up. Some stories take up an entire city, others a bedroom. Some have the stuff of childhood, with very adult consequences, while others show what happens when grown-up people lose what it means to be a child. And then there are some stories that let you off with a warning, while others leave you so arrested that peeling yourself away from them will take days.
There’s more. Toni Morrison once wrote that Tolstoy could never have known that he was writing for a black girl in Lorraine, Ohio. Neil could never have known that he was writing for a confused Jamaican kid who, without even knowing it, was still staggering from centuries of erasure of his own gods and monsters. Sure, myths were religions once, but they are at the core of a people’s and a nation’s identity. So, when I saw Anansi, on the other side of erasure, responding to being rubbed out and forgotten, I found myself wondering who the hell was this man from the UK who had just restored our story. I understood what being taken away from our myths meant