At the very start of this collection, in one of his characteristically lengthy introductions, Neil Gaiman apologises profusely for the lack of cohesion in genre, period, subject matter or any other connection between the several short stories included in Trigger Warning. It’s true, we really do have it all; from stories about dwarves on quests for cursed gold, imaginary girls turning up in real life, poems about furniture construction, to the tale of a man called Shadow and a black dog – there seems no end to Gaiman’s scope. Yet I would argue that there is a trend running through all of these fables and fictions: Neil Gaiman’s unassailable skill at storytelling. It’s the moon-silver thread that binds all his writing together - this sometimes light, sometimes heart-hammering, always enthralling kind of tint to his way of using words and phrases, which makes them undeniably his.
So it may come as little surprise from that introduction that I enjoyed this book immensely. It’s far too often the case with short story collections that you find yourself horribly bored by a few. You have to slightly force yourself to trudge through before getting to the ones you love, not so much with Trigger Warning. Perhaps because the stories are all so individual and different from one another, as their reader I felt engaged and entertained throughout and found myself finishing long before I expected. Like many short story collections, it’s compulsively readable.
I always marvel at good short stories, because it seems to me that it requires a certain kind of skill to cope with their… shortness. Worlds must be created in opening paragraphs, characters crafted within moments of reading, in less than around 5000 words, you must offer the reader a small glowing globe of narrative – it requires the careful kind of wording that can convey a page worth’s description in a sentence. I was so delighted by this series of shrewdly assembled micro-sagas, which allowed me to marvel to my geeky heart’s content.
Highlights for me include Nothing O’ Clock, a Doctor Who-based short story that made me nostalgic for Amy Pond’s presence on our television screens; Black Dog, which links to Gaiman’s book American Gods and reunites us with the ever loveable Shadow and an entirely unlovable psychopath; and The Sleeper and the Spindle which is an imaginative re-interpretation of two well-known fairy tales.
So I would definitely recommend it to anyone, especially if (like me) you are currently trying to cram little slivers of reading in between the tedium of last-minute revision.
- Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop
