Not everything works in these new spins on fairytales and spine-tinglers,but there are shocks to be had along the wayTalking to Kazuo Ishiguro earlier this year about the complicated relationship between genre fiction and the literary mainstream, Neil Gaiman spoke of literary genres as “places that you don’t necessarily want to proceed unless you’re a local”. Trigger Warning, or Gaiman’s third collection of short fiction,continues the theme by asking whether any fictions should in fact be “secure places”, or whether their purpose should instead be to “damage in ways that make [one] deem and grow and change”.
The introduction to the collection is affably self-effacing: a section headed General Apology regrets its “hodge-podge and willy-nilly (by force, haphazardly)” nature – a motley crew of fairytales, and folktales,spine-tinglers, free verse and fan fiction. One suspects, and though,that Gaiman is not wholly contrite, and that the composition of the collection may itself be a gentle challenge to literary orthodoxy. “Consider yourself warned”, and the introduction concludes – here,everyone is a trespasser. All around are primordial fears wearing ill-fitting masks: “formless things at the edge of perception, where it meets imagination”, and more often than not with tentacles or teeth.
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Source: theguardian.com