Book Review #15: "...and then what happened?"

Book 15: Stories: All-New Tales, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio

It took me a long time to finish this book. I've read it bit by bit between other books, when I had nothing else I was reading. By no means was it bad--it was excellent, masterpiece after masterpiece. Some stories were creepy, some were heartwarming, some were strange, and some were all of the above. Even the introduction was amazing, which I quoted in my recent blog post about why I like to read.

I find it difficult to read short stories. Every one of them took me on that same emotional roller-coaster that a novel does. The initial tenativeness with which you'd approach a story you know nothing about. Then the ramping up of action, and the climax. Finally the end, that leaves you wanting to linger in the world of the story, you're not quite ready to leave. There's another story waiting to be read on the next page, but you can't bring yourself to start it. There's no way it could be as intriguing as the story you just finished, the one that left you thinking. And then, when you're ready, maybe minutes, hours, or days later, you start the next one, and the cycle repeats.

I have a feeling one day I'll come back and reread these stories. Short stories seem to be the type that you read over and over. You don't need as much patience to read them a second, third, fourth time like you do a novel. And I've left so much time between reading the stories in this book that I can't remember a lot of them. Just the feelings they left me with.

Of course, anything related to Neil Gaiman I'm more likely to reread. His story in this book, The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains, is fantastic, in which the narrator--a small dangerous man--and a man named Calum MacInnes go in search of treasure in the Black Mountains. Other stories touch on themes as diverse as murder, the death of a loved one, a mysterious lake that's home to a race of humanoids, and a twist on the typical vampire story. There are well-known authors like Jodi Picoult, Diana Wynne Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, and Chuck Palahniuk, and many others I haven't heard of. They're not all fantasy, and some of them leave you wondering whether they could be real or not.

Short stories always leave me feeling slightly unsatisfied, as if I couldn't stay long enough in their different worlds, which is the main reason I couldn't give the book five stars. Some of the stories set my nerves on edge as well, and I'm not the type to enjoy that sort of thing. The fact that they did, however, that they affected my emotions, is a sign of a great story.