Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Neil Gaiman
Language: English
Pages: 363
ISBN: 0060515236
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“A prodigiously imaginative collection.”
—New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice
“Dazzling tales from a master of the fantastic.”
—Washington Post Book World
Fragile Things is a sterling collection of exceptional tales from Neil Gaiman, multiple award-winning (the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Newberry, and Eisner Awards, to name just a few), #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Graveyard Book, Anansi Boys, Coraline, and the groundbreaking Sandman graphic novel series. A uniquely imaginative creator of wonders whose unique storytelling genius has been acclaimed by a host of literary luminaries from Norman Mailer to Stephen King, Gaiman’s astonishing powers are on glorious displays in Fragile Things. Enter and be amazed!
. the – it follows!’ And with this his head lolled on the stone, and his eyes rolled back and saw nothing, ever again. Outside the house, the raven cawed thrice. Inside, strange music had begun to skirl up from the crypt, signifying that, for some, the wake had already started. The younger brother, once more, he hoped, the rightful possessor of his title, picked up a bell and rang for a servant. Toombes the butler was there in the doorway before the last ring had died away. ‘Remove
slow and endless drizzle. You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sing, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken. Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her
and she wonders how they could have been that young, how anybody could have been that young. After a while she notices that there are several children’s books beside the bed, which puzzles her slightly, because she does not believe she keeps books on the bedside table in that room. Nor, she decides, does she have a bedside table there. At the top of the pile is an old paperback book – it must be more than forty years old: the price on the cover is in shillings. It shows a lion, and two girls
for over a hundred and fifty years, in my father’s time, and my grandfather’s time, and my great-grandfather’s time, and now I fear that I must hang it up for there is nothing left that we, or our predecessors in the club, have not eaten.’ ‘I wish I had been here in the twenties,’ said Virginia Boote, ‘when they legally had Man on the menu.’ ‘Only after it had been electrocuted,’ said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. ‘Half fried already it was, all char and crackling. It left none of us with a
they’d blame the wolves or the weather, and resolve to travel in groups, and only in the summer. ‘One traveller, though, he was riding with a bunch of companions through a glen, and there came over the hill, dropped from the trees, up from the ground, a swarm, a flock, a pack of children, armed with daggers and knives and bone clubs and stout sticks, and they pulled the travellers off their horses, and fell on them, and finished them off. All but this one geezer, and he was riding a little