The Sleeper and the Spindle
Written for Melissa Marr and Tim Pratt’s anthology Rags and Bones, subtitled New Twists on Timeless Tales. They asked a few writers to create stories based on stories that had influenced us. I chose two fairy tales.
I love fairy tales. I remember the first one I encountered, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, in a beautiful illustrated book my mother would read to me when I was two. I loved everything about that story and those pictures. She read it to me, and soon enough I was reading it to myself. It wasn’t until I was older that I started pondering the stranger parts of the story, and I wrote ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ (in Smoke and Mirrors).
I loved Sleeping Beauty too, in all her incarnations. When I was a young journalist I read a dozen thick bestsellers, and realised I could retell the story of Sleeping Beauty as a huge, sex-and-shopping blockbuster, complete with an evil multinational corporation, a noble young scientist, and a young girl in a mysterious coma. I decided not to write it: it seemed too calculated, and the sort of thing that might actually put me off the writing career I was hoping for.
When Melissa and Tim asked me for a story, I had been pondering what would happen if two stories were happening at the same time. And what if the women who were already the subjects of the stories had a little more to do, and were active and not passive . . .?
I love this story more than, perhaps, I should. (It is now available as an illustrated storybook in its own right, pictures by the redoubtable Chris Riddell.)
Witch Work
When I was a child and read books of poems I would wonder more than was healthy about the person telling the story. I still do, even with my own poems. In this case there is a witch, and there is a watcher. This was also written as an apologetic gift for Jonathan Strahan, after I realised that The Ocean at the End of the Lane was turning into a novel.
In Relig Odhráin
This is a true story. Well, as true as any story about a sixth-century Irish saint can be. The churchyard is there, on Iona. You can even visit it.
I didn’t mean to write this as a poem, but the metre turned up in my head and after that I simply had no say in the matter.
They used to bury people alive in the walls or the foundations, to ensure that buildings remained standing. Even saints.
Black Dog
We first met Baldur ‘Shadow’ Moon in American Gods, in which he gets caught up in a war between gods in America. In ‘The Monarch of the Glen’, a story in the Fragile Things collection, Shadow found himself a bouncer at a party in northern Scotland.
He is on his way back to America, but in this story has only made it as far as Derbyshire’s Peak District. (This was the very last of the stories in this book to be written and is, as they say on the book jackets, original to this collection.)
I want to thank my friends Colin Greenland and Susanna Clarke for taking me to the Three Stags Heads pub in Wardlow, which, cat, lurchers and all, inspired the opening, and to Colin for telling me that Black Shuck walked Trot Lane, when I asked him about black dogs.
There is one last story to be told, about what happens to Shadow when he reaches London. And then, if he survives that, it will be time to send him back to America. So much has changed, after all, since he went away.
VI. FINAL WARNING
There are monsters in these pages, but as Ogden Nash pointed out in my first short-story collection, Smoke and Mirrors, where there’s a monster, there’s also a miracle.
There are some long stories and some short ones. There are a handful of poems, which perhaps might need their own warning for the people who are frightened, disturbed, or terminally puzzled by poetry. (In my second short-story collection, Fragile Things, I tried to explain that the poems come free. They are bonuses for the kind of people who do not need to worry about sneaky and occasional poems lurking inside their short-story collections.)
There. Consider yourself warned. There are so many little triggers out there, being squeezed in the darkness even as I write this. This book is correctly labelled. Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.
Thank you for coming. Enjoy the things that never happened. Secure your own mask again after you read these stories, but do not forget to help others.
NEIL GAIMAN
In a cabin in the dark woods, 2014
Making a Chair
Today I intended to begin to write.
Stories are waiting like distant thunderstorms grumbling and flickering on the grey horizon and there are emails and introductions and a book, a whole damn book
about a country and a journey and belief I’m here to write.
I made a chair.
I opened a cardboard box with a blade (I assembled the blade)
removed the parts, carried them, carefully, up the stairs.
‘Functional seating for today’s workplace’
I pressed five casters into the base, learned that they press in with a most satisfying pop.
Attached the armrests with the screws, puzzling over the left and the right of it, the screws not being what they should be as described in the instructions. And then the base beneath the seat,
which attached with six 40 mm screws (that were puzzlingly six 45 mm screws).
Then the headpiece to the chairback, the chairback to the seat, which is where the problems start as the middle screw on either side declines to penetrate and thread.
This all takes time. Orson Welles is Harry Lime on the old radio as I assemble my chair. Orson meets a dame and a crooked fortune-teller, and a fat man, and a New York gang boss in exile, and has slept with the dame, solved the mystery, read the script
and pocketed the money
before I have assembled my chair.
Making a book is a little like making a chair.
Perhaps it ought to come with warnings, like the chair instructions.
A folded piece of paper slipped into each copy, warning us:
‘Only for one person at a time.’
‘Do not use as a stool or a stepladder.’
‘Failure to follow these warnings can result in serious injury.’
One day I will write another book, and when I’m done I will climb it,
like a stool or a stepladder,
or a high old wooden ladder propped against the side of a plum tree, in the autumn,
and I will be gone.
But for now I shall follow these warnings, and finish making the chair.