Reading Gaiman

Last week was Neil Gaiman week here. I found 3 Gaiman books in juvenile fiction which we hadn’t read: Odd and the Frost Giant, M for Magic and Stardust. Odd and the Frost Giant was published most recently; it is a fun little fairy tale type story about a boy who has to help 3 Norse gods, bewitched into the appearance of a bear, a fox, and an eagle, return to Asgaard to defeat the Frost Giant and reclaim their form and their kingdom. Odd is crippled and unloved by his stepfather, but he succeeds in his quest with his bravado and lack of self concern. But his encounter with the Frost Giant is a bit anticlimactic. I can’t decide if it is a flaw in the story that the Frost Giant is lovable. He has seized Asgaard and Lady Freya because he wants to possess beauty. While it’s somewhat charming to have a villain intoxicated by the beauty of otherness who then discovers all isn’t perfect, it seems a bit forced. 

Next up: M for Magic, a collection of short stories, some of which are reworked fairy tales, like the story of the ogre under a bridge and one a detective noir riff about a mystery surrounding the death of Humpty Dumpty. Another story tells of an epicurean club who sets off to eat the phoenix. The least likable to me is the story of two boys who go to a party to try to meet girls and discover that the girls are from Someplace Else (outer space? Another dimension?). The last chapter is excerpted from The Graveyard Book, which is still my favorite Gaiman book. Most of the stories were entertaining, only slightly spooky, like when, in the story about the ogre, who wants to eat a boy’s life, the ogre’s awkward twist on words is made literal. The story about the epicures was darkly amusing. Some of these stories delight, but some seem like fiction written by an adolescent, not just for that age group.


I could see my oldest eyeing me when I was reading the book, I think because he didn’t want me to read the story about the teenaged boys, a play on coming of age stories. He had already read it. One boy knows how to romance the girls, the other one is awkward and shy. They walk into a party that turns out to be only girls – but these girls are different. It turns out they are otherworldly beings who have taken the form of human beings to learn about our world. The suave boy ends up running out the door, crying and puking, shortly after he goes upstairs with the most beautiful girl.


So these two books don’t rank with Coraline and The Graveyard Book, but they were fun reads.


Stardust, on the other hand, surprised me. I started reading it at the library until I got to the scene where the young Dunstan makes love to the faerie slave girl. With way too many details. Really, this is juvenile fiction? Is it supposed to be in the adult section? I wondered. Why, Neil? Why write so explicitly, why not just imply artfully what happened between Dunstan and the slave girl instead of giving details from a Harlequin? I didn’t check it out, or read much further. Now I have to vet Gaiman books before I hand them to my kids thinking, “Here’s a bit of good writing.” Maybe I should’ve asked the librarian to move the book to the adult section, but what I did was drop the book back between the two shelves.


A few days later we returned to the library, and it was still hiding there. I wonder how long it will remain.