“Smoke and Mirrors” is a collection of short stories by the author of “American Gods” (and other great novels) Neil Gaiman. Some of these short works are poems, others the more regular prose, some are creepy, some are quirky, all of them make great reading. I am going to review four of the stories that were my favourites out of this collection. There will be spoilers.

“Chivalry”

“Chivalry” starts with a great opening sentence: “Mrs Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat.” It’s a great opener and immediately hooks the reader into asking ‘what on earth …’ and wanting to keep reading and find out. Turns out Mrs Whitaker finds  the grail at an Oxfam shop, of all places. She immediately identifies it as such and doesn’t seem the slightest bit puzzled or excited that she found this at a charity shop. She polishes it and puts it on her mantelpiece, because she thinks it will look nice there. She is just as unphased by the arrival at her door, of Sir Galaad (complete with shiny armour and a white horse) telling her he was on a quest for the grail. When she asks for identification, he gives her a scroll from King Arthur (she was expecting an identification card with a photo, but this was better) and asks her for the grail. She says no and sends him away. The rest of the story involves Galaad visiting regularly offering her various items in exchange for the grail. It is not just Mrs Whitaker who is very sanguine about this. The children in the street just want to pat the horse, and the girl on duty at the charity shop says Galaad is ‘dreamy’. Noone questions his presence. He eventually swaps the grail for the philosopher’s stone and a phoenix egg, which Mrs Whitaker puts on her mantelpiece instead. She sends him on his way with some fruitcake to tide him over. She discovers the next time she visits the shop that the young shop assistant went off with him. She also discovers Aladdin’s magic lamp, though she eventually decides not to buy it.

Why do I like this? Mainly because it’s funny. The story deals with Arthurian legend, chivalry and romance, in the context of working-class English suburbia. The story is told very prosaically, with a British ‘keep calm and carry on’ element that is priceless in this context. Mrs Whitaker, a widow and a pensioner, is quite happy to put Galaad to work around the house when he visits. He is a perfect knight and therefore is happy to help her. She becomes quite fond of him and tells him he’s a ‘nice boy’ before he leaves. It’s a sweet little story and leaves you with a smile on your face.

“Troll Bridge”

“Troll Bridge” gives an interesting, different, and rather creepy version of a troll. More importantly, it is a dark fairy tale depicting a protagonist from childhood to adulthood, and his utter failure to make any meaningful connection. He finds the troll bridge when exploring, his description of the ‘straight path’ he has found being such that it already seems a little surreal. Eventually he comes to a bridge, and underneath it he finds a troll. He is described as everything the boy’s nightmares will be, he starts as translucent but becomes more solid, and he says he wants to ‘eat your life’ (not ‘eat you’, so already the reader is wondering why the troll is putting it like that. In a way it sounds even scarier than the usual threat.)  The boy gets away by telling the troll he’ll be a lot tastier when he’s lived some more. The troll agrees to this and lets him go. The boy undoubtedly has no intention of going back, but the troll has already told him it can smell his dreams and thoughts, and it knows better. The boy growing up is set against a backdrop of a changing landscape, fields and nature giving way to houses and roads. When he sees the troll again he is fifteen, and out with a girl he thinks he is in love with. He has no hesitation, however, in offering her to the troll. The troll doesn’t want her, though. She’s innocent and the boy is not. (He did just offer someone else in his place, so that seems clear.) Again he manages to bargain his way out of it. By the time he goes back to the troll, willingly, he has had a life, a wife, a child, but his wife has left him, telling him (truthfully) that he never loved her, and it seems for all his living he never felt anything much for anyone. The troll ‘eats his life’ which, it turns out, means the troll becomes him and he the troll. It seems the troll has been becoming him all this while, from the very first meeting, slowly changing, until the final metamorphosis did not take much time.

This is such a good story. It’s dark and sinister as only a black fairy tale can be. At the same time it talks about a kid wanting to have a life, experience things, and in the end the man he becomes feels nothing about any of it. He’s happy for the troll to take over, because he hasn’t really valued what he has been given. It’s about how we allow ourselves to exist, go through the motions, instead of really wholeheartedly living.  It’s a spooky story with a moral, I guess, but a good one.

“Bay Wolf”

This story is fun because it gives a nod to the old Universal wolf man movies, as the author has called his protagonist Talbot (after the main character of the old movies Larry Talbot.) This story suggests that Talbot, being functionally immortal, has gone on into the twenty-first century and is now working as an ‘adjuster’, basically a fixer for problems. In this case a mob boss who runs things and deals drugs In Los Angeles, on the beachfront. Someone is killing people on the beach and ripping them apart, leaving bits of them to float ashore. The mob boss is thinking a rival is causing the problem. Talbot knows better. The creature he faces, when it appears, is not named, though its description bears a passing resemblance to the ‘creature from the Black Lagoon’.

It came out of the water slowly, like a man in bad monster movie makeup.

This creature speaks, however, and tells Talbot it is going to kill him. Talbot, however, kills the beast, following him back under the waves to the wreck of an oil rig. The creature has a mother (a nod to ‘Beowulf’, I assume) but Talbot indicates they had sex rather than him killing her.

I enjoyed the old movie reference in this story. But more than that, the story addresses the world-weary exhaustion of Talbot, immortal and living long past anyone he ever knew.

The hardest thing, for such a one as me:

The gift of death should go to such as those.

This is one of the stories that is told in free verse, and Gaiman indicates his skill in this area, a rhythm to the words that, in spite of the unattractive subject matter, has its own kind of beauty.

This must have been the place that he was spawned,

This rusting rig abandoned in the sea.

The end of the story shows how beyond hope Talbot is.

He knew I lied, but wolves are born to lie.

I sat down on the beach to watch the bay,

Stared at the sky as dawn turned into day,

And daydreamed of a day when I might die.

Bleak and beautiful.

“When we went to see the end of the world, by Dawnie Morningside, aged 11 1/4”

Written from a child’s point of view, in a primary school report format on the topic ‘what we did on the Founder’s Day holiday’, this story tells us a very odd story from a very matter-of-fact child’s perspective. The random segue into a recipe for potato salad early on in the story is very child-like, as an older student would have understood that the recipe was not relevant. The first oddity (other than albino chipmunks ) is her description of the trip in terms of time.

Where our house is, it is morning, when we leave, and we got onto the motorway, and we went over the bridge over twilight, and soon it got dark.

Maybe she is just saying they drove all day, but she isn’t really describing that. We discover that Dawnie can be an annoying kid (singing la la la even when her parents ask her to stop). Dawnie mentions her parents arguing about a man who wiped their screen at traffic lights, but the argument is over whether he is ‘good luck or bad luck’, which doesn’t seem to make any sense. She adds their argument was not a ‘bad’ argument, suggesting all is not well in their relationships. The journey gets more and more odd, as Dawnie describes a street with ‘pretty’ men, a street with a woman who was injured, a street with just cats. They leave the city and there are big houses, a comment from Dawnie about how adults lie, and an odd moment where people chase a white stag across the road. (Albino, like the chipmunks? Also there is a story about a white stag being lucky, so there’s a fairy tale element there.) The parents continue to argue, mostly about pointless things. And then they reach the end of the world, as if it’s a roadside attraction. Dawnie is approached by a unicorn. The ‘end of the world’ is a frozen tableau, with creatures coming out of a hole in the ground, apparently to fight other creatures coming from a hole in the sky. Dawnie’s father tells her they are moving, but very slowly. Dawnie doubts this. They have a picnic lunch, and Dawnie’s father hits her mother for something she says. His abusive nature has been coming clear during the course of the story but this is the only physical violence. Dawnie doesn’t know why this happened, and is not particularly surprised by it, indicating it happens all the time. She walks around with her little sister, and hears the end of the world trumpet in her head. When they get back to twilight, and finally home to morning (also illustrating that there seems to be a problem with time) she wishes she’d never seen it, and wishes she could be someone else.

So, what is going on with this story? The world building shows us that something very odd has happened. Where people live is always the same time of day ie Dawnie and her family live in morning. Dawnie’s name is an indicator here – Dawn and Morningside, so she lives on the morning side. The journey is from morning to dark as if these are physical places rather than times of day. Why is Dawn so calm about the description – it’s part of her world, no more bizarre than her parents fighting. Thematically it shows people who are all frozen, unable to progress. This is why Dawn’s father is so angry and why he is so vehemently against the concept of wishes. Dawn’s wishing to unsee what she’s seen indicates she has been given a shock, forced to grow up sooner than she should. She’s been shown that life is futile. It’s a very sad story.

So, this collection is varied enough to give most readers something to enjoy. Gaiman’s ability to evoke atmosphere that can be unsettling, straight out scary, funny, or just weird makes for an entertaining read. I would recommend this collection to any fans of Gaiman, any readers of horror fiction, or anyone who might enjoy something a little different.