Neil Gaiman: Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

IV. GENERAL APOLOGY

I firmly believe that short-story collections should be the same sort of thing all the way through. They should not, hodgepodge and willy-nilly, assemble stories that were obviously not intended to sit between the same covers. They should not, in short, contain horror and ghost stories, science fiction and fairy tales, fabulism and poetry, all in the same place. They should be respectable.

This collection fails this test.

For this failure, as for so much, I request your indulgence and forgiveness, and hope only that somewhere in these pages you may encounter a story you might otherwise never have read. Look. Here is a very small one, waiting for you now:

Shadder

Some creatures hunt. Some creatures forage. The Shadder lurk. Sometimes, admittedly, they skulk. But mostly, they just lurk.

The Shadder do not make webs. The world is their web. The Shadder do not dig pits. If you are here you have already fallen.

There are animals that chase you down, run fast as the wind, tirelessly, to sink their fangs into you, to drag you down. The Shadder do not chase. They simply go to the place where you will be, when the chase is over, and they wait for you there, somewhere dark and indeterminate. They find the last place you would look, and abide there, as long as they need to abide, until it becomes the last place that you look and you see them.

You cannot hide from the Shadder. They were there first. You cannot outrun the Shadder. They are waiting at your journey’s end. You cannot fight the Shadder, because they are patient, and they will tarry until the last day of all, the day that the fight has gone out of you, the day that you are done with fighting, the day the last punch has been thrown, the last knife-blow struck, the last cruel word spoken. Then, and only then, will the Shadder come out.

They eat nothing that is not ready to be eaten. Look behind you.

V. ABOUT THE CONTENT OF THIS BOOK

Welcome to these pages. You can read about the stories you will encounter here, or you can skip this and come back and see what I have to say after you’ve read the stories. I’m easy.

Making a Chair

Some days the words won’t come. On those days, I normally try to revise something that already exists. On that day, I made a chair.

A Lunar Labyrinth

I met Gene Wolfe over thirty years ago, when I was a twenty-two-year-old journalist, and I interviewed him about his four-part novel, The Book of the New Sun . Over the next five years we became friends, and we have been friends ever since. He is a good man and a fine, deep writer, always tricky, always wise. His third novel, Peace, written when I was almost a boy, is one of my favourite books. His most recent novel, The Land Across, was the book I read with the most enjoyment this year, and is as deceptive and dangerous as any book he has written.

One of Gene’s finest short stories is called ‘A Solar Labyrinth’. It’s about a labyrinth made of shadows and is a darker story than it seems on the surface.

I wrote this story for Gene. If there are solar labyrinths, there should be lunar ones too, after all, and a Wolfe to bay at the moon.

The Thing About Cassandra

When I was about fourteen, it seemed much easier to imagine a girlfriend than to have one – that would involve actually talking to a girl, after all. So I would, I decided, write a girl’s name on the cover of my exercise books and deny all knowledge of her when asked, thus, I fondly imagined, causing everyone to think that I actually had a girlfriend. I do not believe it worked. I never actually got around to imagining anything about her but the name.

I wrote this story in August of 2009, on the Isle of Skye, while my then-girlfriend Amanda had flu and tried to sleep it off. When she woke I would bring her soup and honeyed drinks, then read her what I had written of the story. I am not certain how much of it she remembers.

I gave the story to Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin for their anthology Songs of Love and Death, and was inordinately relieved when they liked it.

Down to a Sunless Sea

The Guardian newspaper was celebrating World Water Day with a week of stories about water. I was in Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest Festival, where I was recording the audiobooks of The Ocean at the End of the Lane and my first short-story collection, Smoke and Mirrors .

I was thinking of Grand Guignol, of heartbreaking monologues whispered by lonely performers to a captive audience, and remembering some of the more painful tales from The Newgate Calendar . And London, in the rain, a long long way from Texas.

‘The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .’

There are stories you build, and there are stories you construct, then there are stories that you hack out of rock, removing all the things that are not the story.

I wanted to edit an anthology of stories which were cracking good reads with, perhaps, a fantasy or SF edge, but mostly that simply kept people turning the pages. Al Sarrantonio became my coeditor on the project. We called the book Stories, which might have been a good title for it, before Google. It was not enough to edit the book. I had to write a story for it.

I have visited many peculiar places in the world, places that can hold your mind and your soul tightly and will not let them go. Some of those places are exotic and unusual, some are mundane. The strangest of all of them, at least for me, is the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland. I know I am not alone in this. There are people who discover Skye and will not leave, and even for those of us who do leave, the misty island haunts us and holds us in its own way. It is where I am happiest and where I am most alone.

Otta F. Swire wrote books about the Hebrides and about Skye in particular, and she filled her books with strange and arcane knowledge. (Did you know May the third was the day that the devil was cast out of heaven, and thus the day on which it is unpardonable to commit a crime? I learned that in her book on the myths of the Hebrides.) And in one of her books, she mentioned the cave in the Black Cuillins where you could go, if you were brave, and get gold, with no cost, but each visit you paid to the cave would make you more evil, would eat your soul.

And that cave, and its promise, began to haunt me.

I took several true stories (or stories that are said to be true, which is almost the same thing) and gave them to two men, set them in a world that was almost, but not quite, ours, and told a story of revenge and of travel, of desire for gold and of secrets. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novelette ( Stories won for Best Anthology) and the Locus Award for Best Novelette, and I was very proud of it, my story.

Before it was published, I was set to appear on the stage of the Sydney Opera House and was asked if I could do something with Australian string quartet FourPlay (they are the rock band of string quartets, an amazing, versatile bunch with a cult following): perhaps something with art that could be projected onto the stage.

I thought about ‘The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . .’: it would take about seventy minutes to read. I wondered what would happen if a string quartet created a moody and glorious soundtrack while I told the story, as if it were a movie. And what if Scottish artist Eddie Campbell, he who drew Alan Moore’s From Hell, writer and artist of Alec, my favourite comic, created illustrations for this most Scottish of my stories and projected them above me while I read?