Re-read review: Smoke and Mirrors, by Neil Gaiman
This set of short stories feels like more of a coherent whole than some Neil Gaiman collections. Almost of them have a dark, unsettling feeling to them that makes them perfect for a spooky October read.
One of my favorite stories in the collection isn’t listed separately: ‘The Wedding Present,’ in the introduction, involves a letter with a ‘Portrait of Dorian Grey’ quality. Another favorite is ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’, a story that will change forever how you look at the princess with hair black as coal, lips red as blood, and skin white as snow who stays beautiful within a glass coffin. ‘Chivalry’ is an outlier from the creepy tone, being a cute tale of an old lady who finds the Holy Grail in her local charity shop...and knows exactly what it is, but also thinks it just looks nice on the mantle. ‘We Can Get Them For You Wholesale’ starts with a similar quirky style, but when a man who can’t resist a bargain tries to engage a very accommodating firm of assassins, things go wrong very fast.
Some stories echo other Gaiman works. In ‘Cold Colors’ a story set in a world where magic and technology are one, there’s a bit about holy water that very much reminds me of how Crowley escapes his hellish colleagues in ‘Good Omens’:
What I see in the jug: it looks holy enough, but you can’t know for sure, not unless you are yourself a siren or a fetch, coagulating out of a telecom mouthpiece…I’ve dumped telephones in buckets of the stuff before now…One afternoon there was a queue of them, trapped on the tape of my ansaphone: I copied it to floppy and filed it away. You want it? Listen, everything’s for sale.
In ‘Murder Mysteries’, a tale of a murder that predates the universe, the way Raguel says “I never fell. I don’t care what they say. I’m still doing my job, as I see it” also reminds me of Crowley’s insistence that he didn’t so much fall as “saunter vaguely downwards”. But what the core of the story really resembles is the heavenly Silver City of the ‘Sandman’ comics, and its Lucifer is clearly a pre-Fall version of the one we encounter there. By the way…it took me three reads of this story to realize what happened between Raguel and the narrator, and why the title is plural!
I wish Gaiman would do a whole collection of stories about werewolf “adjustor” Larry Talbot. ‘Only the End of the World Again’ is a noir detective story meets Lovecraft:
“We’re ending the world, Mr. Talbot, The Deep Ones will rise out of their ocean graves and eat the moon like a ripe plum.” “Then I won’t ever have to worry about full moons anymore, will I?”
‘Bay Wolf’ apparently came about because Gaiman had written a screenplay for ‘Beowolf’ but people kept thinking he’d said ‘Bay Watch’. So this time Talbot is the hero of a version of Beowulf set in then-future LA:
Two of them are playing in the surf…It would be suicide if the enemy came every night. But the enemy does not come every night, so they run through the surf, splashing, screaming with pleasure. I got sharp ears (all the better to hear them with) and sharp eyes (all the better to see them with) and they’re so fucking young and happy fucking I could spit. The hardest thing, for such a one as me: the gift of death should go to such as those...It came up out of the water slowly, like a man in bad monster movie makeup…Avaunt, foul beast, I said. He stared at me with eyes that glittered like two crack pipes. Avaunt? Shit, boy. Who’s going to make me? Me, I quipped. I am. I’m one of the avaunt guard. He just looked blank, and hurt, a bit confused, and for a moment I almost felt sorry for him. And then the moon came out from behind a cloud, and I began to howl.
Lovecraftian influence also pops up in ‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar’, when an American tourist blunders into the British version of Innsmouth and has a few beers with its, er, fishy inhabitants:
“Is there an Innsmouth in the States?” asked Ben. “I should say so,” said the smaller man. “He wrote about it all the time. Him whose name we don’t mention”… “Yer. H.P. Lovecraft. I don’t know what the fuss is about. He couldn’t bloody write.” He slurped his stout, then licked his lips with a long and flexible tongue… “He’d write one of his bloody sentences. Ahem. ‘The gibbous moon hung low over the eldritch and batrachian inhabitants of squamous Dulwich.’…What he means is that the moon was nearly full, and everybody what lived in Dulwich was bloody peculiar frogs. That’s what he means.”
A lot of these stories are more sexually charged than you might be expecting if you first found Gaiman through, say, ‘Coraline’ or ‘Good Omens’…but all in a way that enhances the creepiness rather than being actually sexy, if you see what I mean. ‘Foreign Parts’, for instance, involves an STD with very unusual effects, while what haunted me from ‘One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock’ wasn’t how the main character copes with his outsider status with Elric novels but something his friend casually says near the end that had me going: Gah! No, do NOT join that ‘private religious discussion group’! Tell your friend he needs to tell his parents about that shit!
Some of the stories have implications I don’t particularly care for. However, I’m apt to give the author the benefit of the doubt as far as intent goes. For instance, if you tried to guess at Gaiman’s views on abortion based on ‘Mouse’, you would probably be incorrect – the introduction notes that he was trying to write something in the style of Raymond Carver, and “I’m afraid I actually did hear the radio broadcast mentioned in the text”. Likewise, while I personally doubt gender works the way it is portrayed in ‘Changes’....who knows, maybe if a drug that allowed you to change sex at will that also extended your lifespan was available, everyone, after a period of societal resistance, would end up taking it all the time. It’s not like that’s something we’ve ever had an opportunity to test! Heck, I might try it out of curiosity - But only if I knew for sure I could change back, since I’m pretty sure it would give me instant dysphoria1!
1. More than being a werewolf, weirdly, which I think would be kind of cool. I can’t explain that except as a sort of social and physical uncanny valley thing: you'd kinda sorta have the same life and kinda sorta look like you, but not close enough or far enough for comfort.
Overall Recommendation: Gaiman as a writer has huge range. This collection is a great illustration of his ability to create unsettling tales that linger with you for days.
