Long Past Midnight
by Jason Helms
It’s rare that I stay up until the light hours of night. Since adulthood I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve stayed out for the party or stayed up for the conversation.
So it was odd to be looking at the clock, seeing that it was two in the morning, and pouring more wine to get me through another engrossing short story in Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors.
Gaiman is a cross-media writer, delving into film (MirrorMask and the upcoming Beowulf), novels (American Gods), and graphic novels (Sandman) with equal ease. But with Smoke and Mirrors, his talent for short fiction outshines the rest; painting a hideous landscape filled with beautiful and broken characters, a place where the daily sins of reality bleed into fantasy.
Chivalry (possibly the best in the collection) and The Price (a close second) use the devil, the Holy Grail, and a mystical black cat to weave tales set in the real world. These early stories in Smoke and Mirrors have a hopeful, almost old-fashioned quality, a tone that changes as the book progresses. A touch of cynicism sneaks in with The Troll Bridge and grows with each new story. At times, the microscope that Gaiman holds up to human frailty can be a little hard to bear. The cold pornography of Tastings and the religious cynicism of Murder Mysteries descend into heartless desperation.
Gaiman’s work is more about the setting and characters than carefully constructed plot. To him, the humans are more interesting than the monsters.
In this he has something in common with his American counterpart Stephen King: he’s not a genre writer. At least, not in the airport novel sense. True, many of his pieces have a dark, supernatural quality, but Gaiman is willing to stretch the boundaries of his genre if any cliché threatens to stifle the story.
In his heart, Gaiman is just a big fan. He revels in plot twists and cool characters. He adores other authors so much that he set his story Only the End of the World Again in a fictional town created by H.P. Lovecraft.
But most of all, Gaiman is a fan of his readers. Every story in Smoke and Mirrors is coupled with anecdotes about its creation – notes written in such an open, peer-to-peer style that they spark daydreams about going out for a pint with the author and getting lost in hours of geeky conversation about werewolves, Greek gods, and the magical land of Faerie.
So start early, turn on the living room lights, arm yourself with coffee and a warm blanket, and prepare to combat the only thing that can keep you from finishing Smoke and Mirrors in one sitting: bedtime.
Smoke and Mirrors
Author: Neil Gaiman
Publisher: Avon
Date: August 30, 2005
Available at: All major book sellers
Price: paperback: $7.00 (available)
