Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

In the decades since his groundbreaking comic book 'The Sandman' shot him to fame, English author Neil Gaiman has been spinning tales of a world where the long-forgotten gods of mythology haunt the back-alleys and tenement flats of our everyday lives. Now he has gathered together more than thirty of his best prose short stories in his new anthology 'Fragile Things'. The collection has a strong local flavour to it, as 'Closing Time' conveys the sinister side of childhood in postwar Middle England and 'The Monarch of the Glen' charts the rise of an ancient evil in the Scottish Highlands (obvious when you think about it), but the better tales see the author exploring his adopted homeland of America with equal parts weariness and vibrant joy. Two of these stories quietly evoke the transient neither-here-nor-there quality of wayward American lives, while the stellar 'Harlequin Valentine' throws the zany cartoon characters of the commedia dell'Arte into a love story in suburban Kentucky that will warm your heart and break it at the same time. It's a clever trick, and the crowning achievement of 'Fragile Things' is ultimately Gaiman's ability to make the familiar world uncanny, in lingering tales that haunt and console simultaneously. [Daniel Wood]