My two personal favourites are the two last stories of the book.
Until she is visited by no other than Sir Galaad and let the bargaining begins! Or the terrifying Babycakes ,which was written for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and in two pages manages to both make the point of what animals suffer and disturb the hell out of anyone: what if the animals disappeared from the planet – what would we eat, what would we wear, what would be used for research. Or for example, Chivalry, the opening story where an old English lady finds the Holy Grail in a Charity Shop ( oh, the allure of the British charity shops, one in every corner, you can find all sorts of treasures -and all sorts of trash too) which she immediately recognised for what it is and nonchalantly buys it because it would look really nice in the mantelpiece. Like The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories which follows a screenplay writer (whose script was picked up by a Hollywood Studio), on his visit to LA and his surreal meetings with studio executives who kept changing his story – this is the funniest story in the book and perhaps the least Fantastic – I definitely can see that happening in LA! I read the book over a one month period, savouring one or two a day depending on my mood (I skipped the poems as they are not really my cup of tea, though) and some were better than the others or course, but quite a few were simply outstanding, about ten of them. There isn’t one single theme – but they are all in the realm of the Fantastic – Sci-fi, Horror, Fantasy, ranging from absurd and funny, to crazy and to the downright horrific but all of them have some sort of otherworldness feel to it, even the couple of Erotic tales. In different formats: most in prose, some in verse, one sestina. There are 34 short stories altogether – they can either be one page long or several. For Neil Gaiman, in that sense, stories are like mirrors – Fantasy above all: “which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see”.Īlso in the introduction a short paragraph per story, that tells us how each of them came to be, whether they were ordered for a particular publication or came to life out of nothing, or how and where they were published if ever – most of all he talks about what inspired them and it gives an amazing insight into the mind of the author – provided that he is speaking the truth of course. The fun begins right in the introduction with an explanation of the title itself: how mirrors and smoke have been used by magicians since Victorian times and how mirrors appear to tell the truth but can be used to deceive, inveigle and obfuscate. Smoke and Mirrors is a collection of short fiction written by Neil Gaiman that were originally published in different venues (and some never even published before) and created for a different purpose – all brought together in this volume.
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