One of my favourite short dark fictions is Babycakes, written for the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’s request, a touching and shocking story about a sad world without animals, about cruelty against defenseless animals. Another favourite horror story of mine, Snow, Glass, Apples, is a new version of an old and well-known tale, with scary hints about a malevolent and evil creature who was supposed to be the nice protagonist. One of the short fictions, The Wedding Present, is a story of a happy marriage and a ghostly wedding gift that shows the couple a nightmarish future in an alternative world… Another writing, Changes, is the story of a doctor who found a cure of cancer, however, it changes the patients’ genders, and soon some people use it for pleasure and fun… A short fiction, titled The Daughter of Owls, is written in sophisticated (yet never stilted) classic English of John Aubrey. Its protagonist is a young girl who who was found near a medieval village as an infant. Nobody is willing to bring her up, as villagers consider her a changeling, but they let her stay near the village in an abandoned old building, and they bring food for her from time to time. She turns out to be a beautiful young girl, and when males in the village learn how beautiful she is, they plan something terrible against her. However, they do not know that she was indeed a changeling… Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar is about a young American tourist who visits an ancient, crumbling little town in Great Britain, and finds it and its inhabitants truly strange and sinister – this story, easy to say from the title, is a tribute to the horror master H. P. Lovecraft. Looking for the Girl is a nostalgic weird fiction, written for the Penthouse, about the days of youth that has already gone and about a beautiful and strangely scary nude model, named Charlotte, whose appearance and age never changes throughout the years.
Don’t Ask Jack is about an old and sinister toy of whom children are afraid, for it brings bad luck to them – it reminds me of Stephen King’s short story The Monkey from his anthology The Skeleton Crew.
Foreign Parts is a short story about a frustrated and squeamish young man who never seeks physical contact with females, yet somehow he got a sexually transmitted disease. It has a scary and strange explanation…
The stories have dark, often grotesque atmosphere. According to Stephen King, Neil Gaiman’s stories are treasures, and we are fortunate having them to enjoy. How right he is.
Neil Gaiman is amongst the very few dark fantasy/horror genre author who was on the top of the New York Times bestseller list. The English writer has won, amongst others, World Fantasy Award, Hugo Award for Best Novel, Nebula Award for Best Novel, Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, Locus Award for Best Short Story, and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature.
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