Smoke and Mirrors is a collection of “Short Fictions and Illusions” by Neil Gaiman. It includes short stories, fragments and poems. The book is very consistent in tone, most are horror stories and more sexual than his usual stuff. The quality varies. Most stories are any-author-good, some are Neil-Gaiman-great, a few are weak. I don’t care that much for his poems, but they aren’t bad.

Here my comments to the stories and so on themselves.

Reading the Entrails: A Rondel

As I said before, I don’t care that much for his poems. It’s nice, but the thing I like most about it, is the Lewis Carroll quote before it.

The Wedding Present (in the introduction) [Favourite]

A very nice take on Dorian Gray, with a very chilling and sad ending.

Chivalry [Favourite]

Didn’t you always want to know, what would happen, if an old English lady found the Holy Grail at Oxfam’s?
I love this story. It’s sweet, funny (one of the few in this book that aren’t horror) and it has a knight in shining armour, who really is a knight in shining armour.

Nicholas Was… [Favourite]

You can have your own look at the story (reproduced in its entirety, taken from here):

Nicholas Was…

older than sin, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.
The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.
Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves’ invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.
He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.
Ho.
Ho.
Ho.

I really like it, it’s a goose bump story and shows perfectly that you don’t need many words to create a tight atmosphere.

The Price

Do you know what your cats, if some live with you, are up to? This story holds the answer, probably.
It’s a nice story, not very surprising, but solid.

Troll Bridge [Favourite]

A young boy comes to a bridge and encounters a troll, with whom he has to bargain for his life.
It’s a take on the classic fairy tale Three Billy Goats Gruff, remodelled and with a surprise ending.
And a new favourite quote: “I saw her chewing gum, when I was thirteen, and I fell for her like a suicide from a bridge.”

Don’t Ask Jack

A probably evil Jack-in-a-Box. Don’t we all have one?
It’s very short and has an unfinished feel to it. And I read it yesterday and just had to have another look to see what that story was again, so definitely a weaker one.

The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories

An author comes to Hollywood to write a screenplay for his book. According to the introduction, parts of the story actually happened.
It’s all very weird. There isn’t much that happens in this story, but it’s very atmospheric and I love the bit with the “30 minutes city”.

Eaten, The White Road and Queen of Knives form a tryptichon. All three are narrative poems.

Eaten (Scenes from a Moving picture)

Eaten is like the plot outline of a screenplay for a horror movie, with some pornographic scenes, but in form of a poem and with a few scenes already more detailed than others.
And it really is a horror story. I think it’s one of the most frightening things he’s ever written. I don’t really get, though, why it had to be a poem, I think it would have worked better as a story or a real screenplay.

The White Road

That’s a take on the classic Bluebeard story, though I’ve never read one with that kind of ending. Pretty gruesome, even more than the original, if that’s possible. Here, I understand the poem form and I like it, it fits the whole thing very much.

Queen of Knives

A boy goes with his grandparents to a variety show, with a magician.
The story, again according to the introduction, is very close to real life, so close that he had people asking him, if that really happened. Again, I don’t get why it’s a poem. But it’s not disturbing or anything (it being a poem, I mean). It’s a nice story.

The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch

A writer and his friends take Miss Finch, a biogeologist, out to see a circus (a dark, kind of vampire-y circus) and she disappears.
I like it, although it’s a bit predictable.

Changes [Favourite]

A scientist develops a cure for cancer, which has the side effect of changing the sex of the person.
According to the introduction, he first meant to make it into a novel and I think that there’s enough stuff in there to fill one. But it also works as this short story. Very well, in fact.

The Daughter of Owls

I don’t really know what to do with that one. Not my cup of tea, I guess.

Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar

A backpacker travels on foot along the British coast line and happens upon the town of Innsmouth, where he spends a night drinking with some locals.
The story is really cool and weird. It’s obviously an allusion to H.P. Lovecraft, but I never read anything by him, so I can’t really say.

Virus

Everybody who has ever been addicted to a computer game, knows that feeling. [And don’t tell me you have never been – if you do, you’re either a liar or have never touched one.] For me, it was Tetris.
I think that poems grasps that addiction really well.

Looking for the Girl

A young boy falls in love with a girl he sees in a Penthouse magazine.
The story works just fine, but seems a bit uninspired. Mysterious girl, inspiring muse, yadda, yadda.

Only the End of the World Again [Favourite]

Larry Talbot is a werewolf and adjuster [Private Investigator?] and gets drawn into the end of the world, or the end of the end of the world.
Again, H.P. Lovecraft sends his greetings. Again, I loved the story. And I loved Larry Talbot. [I think, I need to tackle Lovecraft soon.] It’s weird, it’s somehow confusing, but it’s really cool.

Bay Wolf

Larry Talbot’s back. This time, he takes on a murder case.
This story’s not as good as “Only the End of the World Again”, but it’s nice.

Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot

Some of the stories to each card are very haunting, they definitely fit the titles. I would have liked illustrations for the whole thing. Or at least a pack of Tarot cards I could have looked at.

We Can Get Them For You Wholesale

A young man gets cheated on by his fiancée and decides to hire a killer he finds in the yellow pages.
That story is really funny and I really liked it. The “We only needed to be asked”-part is very creepy.

One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock [Favourite]

Snippets of a young boy’s life and his relation with Michael Moorcock‘s books.
It’s a very sweet and heartwarming story, I really, really loved it. And it really made me want to read Moorcock.

Cold Colours [Favourite]

What would happen, if computers could only be controlled by dark magic?
It’s another narrative poem, this one I like again. It’s a cool idea and it works good, as well.

The Sweeper of Dreams [Favourite]

It gave me goose bumps. It’s a wonderful idea, but much, much too short.

Foreign Parts

A man contracts some form of STD, without having sex. Of course, that’s not all there’s to it.
The story is funny. Nothing really new about it, but it’s okay.

Vampire Sestina

A poem. Not a narrative one, but, as the title already suggests, a sestina. And it’s beautiful.

Mouse [Favourite]

A man sets out to buy a mousetrap which doesn’t kill a mouse, he comes home… actually, there’s not much of a plot, but it’s, in my opinion, the scariest story in the whole book. And very sad. It’s heavily symbolic and so real.

The Sea Change

Another poem. Most of them kind of leave me shrugging. This one as well. I loved the last three lines, though:

The voice of the storm is whispering to me.
The voice of the beach is whispering to me.
The voice of the waves is whispering to me.

How Do You Think It Feels?

A love affair, a gargoyle.
I just scanned the pages again, to see if I have something to say about it, but it’s pretty much average.

When We Went to See the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside, age 11¼

The story is sweet, but the best thing about it is the End of the World. I would like to see a very long story set there. Like trilogy-long. And then some sequels. I think it would be good enough for that.

Desert Wind

A poem, about a man, who almost dies in a desert.
It seems a bit uninspired. Don’t know. Another shrug.

Tastings

A man and a woman in a hotel room who talk while they fuck.
NG writes in the introduction that it took him four years to finish the story because every second paragraph or so, he would blush so hard that it took him another couple of months to write the next paragraph. I didn’t think it that explicit (but, well, I read Palahniuk, Ellis and Houellebecq without so much as blinking, so I’m probably no standard). It was a nice story. With a bit of a twist.

In the End

The last book of the bible.
A beautiful end of the world.

Babycakes

It’s a story for PETA, which really hammers the message home. A bit too much message for my taste.

Murder Mysteries [Favourite]

A young man comes to LA and remembers the last time he was there. He met a guy, who told him a story. A story about angels and murder.
The story is really cool. I love the kind of Miltonian Lucifers and the way Gaiman portrays angels. And as it’s a murder story, it has the kind of Agatha Christie All-suspects-in-the-room ending. Except that it’s not the end at all.

Snow, Glass, Apples [Favourite]

Snow White as seen through the eyes of the Stepmother.
As NG promises in the introduction, I don’t think that I will be able to read the original story in the same way again. I like it.