Anything is Possible

Neil Gaiman’s new collection leads you on a trail of possibilities, and there is darkness on the way.

In ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’ (the story’s title borrowed from David Bowie’s 1976 persona who lived on red peppers, milk and, of course, cocaine), the Queen whom the Duke has gone to bravely rescue posits a question: “What is bigger than the Universe?” The Duke, already nervous about his task, begins to say something about “Underspace and Undertime” before he offers another response: “The mind, then, for it can hold a universe, but also imagine things that have never been, and are not.” That there, is why one should pick up Trigger Warning, the latest from the super-prolific Neil Gaiman — to take a peek inside a mind that imagines things that have never been, and which does so by looking at the things that do exist, even though they might not be quite so tangible.

Gaiman’s third proper collection of short stories (after Smoke and Mirrors in 1998 and Fragile Things in 2006) contains stories written for various magazines, anthologies and media over the ages and feature themes that are potentially upsetting to us as readers: death, betrayal, heartbreak, evil ghosts, and even hope, because it is the most upsetting thing when lost.

If you’ve been reading his work in the genre, you know how it is with Gaiman — the stories are not just one thing or the other. In fact, it would be easier to approach them as “possibilities”, mulled over and sketched out in prose, verse (‘Making a Chair’, ‘My Last Landlady’, ‘Witch Work’ and ‘In Relig Odhráin’) and in the case of ‘Orange’, a questionnaire as well! Trigger Warning features a motley crew of children, sailors, old men and women, bee-keepers, dukes and queens and everybody in between, and most stories come with a little twist, especially the spooky ones.

While the collection is uneven in terms of storytelling and resolution, there are flashes of brilliance, especially in ‘The Thing About Cassandra’, where a young artist finds out that the girlfriend he made up as a teenager has come to life, ‘Click-Clack the Rattlebag’, where a young man is told about a scary creature, and the beautiful and haunting ‘The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains’, about two men who travel to a mysterious location in search of hidden gold, and revenge.

There’s also ‘Nothing O’ Clock’ which should please fans of Dr Who, where the Time Lord battles the Kin; Gaiman wrote it as a “digital short” in 2013. The highlight of the collection is ‘Black Dog’, a 45-page story featuring Shadow from Gaiman’s award-winning novel American Gods.

Somewhere in his introduction to the individual stories, Gaiman writes: “Writers live in houses other people built”. Nowhere is this made more clear than in the engaging ‘The Case of Death and Honey’, a tale that takes off after Mycroft, Sherlock Holmes’s brother, has passed away, telling Sherlock to find out about death itself. Not a young man himself, Holmes sets off on a journey to China where he lives with an elderly bee-keeper and makes a discovery about bees and honey that could reverse the course of human existence. And though it is a Sherlock Holmes story, one couldn’t help but recall Roald Dahl’s Royal Jelly and its story of metamorphosis.

Throughout the collection, one delights in Gaiman’s wonderful ability at creating an atmosphere where anything is possible, sometimes in a style that is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. But his twists are not quite humorously macabre as Dahl’s — the darkness here is unforgiving when it appears, and lingers on. As Gaiman writes in the introduction: Consider yourself warned.

📣 For more lifestyle news, click here to join our WhatsApp Channel and also follow us on Instagram