The characters populating Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things precariously perch on the edges of reality. They risk falling into worlds of despair at any moment. They peer through the veil to see what lies beyond, and what they see is often awesome and terrifying at once. Fragile Things, then, is a fitting title for such a collection.
Fragile Things contains a staggering variety of stories and poems. Despite wild variations in format and style, they all feel at home between the book’s covers. Each narrative feels like a modern take on Edgar Allen Poe: mysterious, on the fringes of reality, and deeply personal. Darkness pervades these stories, but Gaiman offsets the horrors with bits of humor and hope. Generally, I enjoyed my time with the book, but it felt piecemeal, like a handful of finished concepts and others that beg for more time or depth. I can pinpoint the reason: there’s a fine line between “ambiguous” and “unfinished.”
Now, I imagine Gaiman would label most of these stories and poems “ambiguous.” That’s the whole ethos of the book, after all. The characters balance on the precipice of the unknown, and their stories end with questions as often as they end with answers. I don’t want to harp on ambiguity too much. My favorite movie (2001: A Spaced Odyssey) has one of the most famously ambiguous endings of all time. It can be deployed as an effective and impactful storytelling device. The problem here is that it feels like the whole goal. When every piece of short fiction ends with a headscratcher, it wears on me. When it works, it works. When it doesn’t, it’s just another story to get through instead of actively enjoy.
In How To Talk To Girls At Parties, a teen and his best mate do exactly what the title suggests. They soon discover the girls and the party are not what they at first assumed. Gaiman doesn’t bother spoonfeeding the reader details, but the “reveal” (in quotes here because it is gradually rolled out as the story moves rather than given as a final gut punch) scratches the itch just enough.
Gaiman is good at this sort of thing, but it doesn’t permeate the rest of the stories. Many of the remaining tales reed like fleeting wisps of nifty ideas, ghosts waking for one last stroll through the land of the living. Some stories succeed—the tale of a maybe dead man roaming the world and having strange interactions with the people he meets (including standing in for a professor at a research conference)? Lovely. A story about an exclusive club where men tell strange stroies and share half-remembered happenings from their pasts? Misses the mark for me. For you, things could be very different. Perhaps that was Gaiman’s goal. In fact, I’m inclined to believe it was. These stories wouldn’t mesh so well without triggering that trademark “hmmm” when they ended.
So now I ask myself: is Fragile Things bad, or did I just not jive with it all that much? The real answer is worth 90 minutes of dedicated viewing. This review is just my semi-long-winded way of saying some readers are probably ravenous for the type of stories in Fragile Things. I felt no such hunger, but I enjoyed a handful of the morsels Gaiman dropped in these pages.
Rating: Fragile Things – 6.5/10
-Cole
