donderdag 19 mei 2016

Neil Gaiman: Trigger Warning

Hi

This review is about Neil Gaiman’s short stories collection Trigger Warning.
I got my copy at the Standaard Boekhandel. It has a 27-page introduction, a 4-page interview with the man himself and 303 pages of short stories.
You can find my other Neil Gaiman reviews here.

“’ We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting. These are stories about those masks, and the people we are underneath them.' Neil Gaiman, writing from a cabin in the dark woods.
Make sure you secure your own mask before reading. Before being transported to worlds filled with witches, watchers and big black bees, with deathless Kin and pirate girls, with things that prowl in the darkness beyond the circle fire, to find the Shadder lurking at your journey's end. But then what happens? There's always something waiting for you. There's always more. Just keep turning the pages.
'We each have our little triggers.'
Literary alchemy from 'a writer of rare perception and endless imagination' (William Gibson), TRIGGER WARNING is a cornucopia of storytelling: horror and ghost stories, science fiction and fairy tales, fabulism and poetry. It will open your eyes to the inexhaustible supply of darkness around you, the magic and the monsters, the myths and the miracles, and to finding truths in the most extraordinary of places.”

As you may know by now, I’m not the biggest fan of short stories.
This collection is very interesting.

The themes, the kind of characters and the plotlines of the stories in the collection are all very different.
Gaiman is definitely playing around, experimenting with his writing-ability and trying out what works and what doesn’t. And it works.
The overarching theme of Trigger Warnings is very clearly played out in most stories. These characters are in some way broken. They might have gone through something traumatizing, done something awful or they might just be damaged. I loved that. A central theme makes it a lot easier to enjoy a short stories collection and I liked this theme in particular. Broken people make for lovely stories.

I enjoyed this collection. It’s different and new. It’s also identifiable, funny, sad, dark, full of meaning, diverse and really enjoyable.
But it's not really anything special.

3 STARS

Happy reading.
Helena

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