Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders is a collection of short stories, poems, and vignettes. In his introduction, Neil Gaiman reflects on the fragility of stories, hearts, dreams, and people, and provides brief notes on the origins and inspirations behind each piece. The collection ranges across horror, fantasy, science fiction, dark comedy, and literary metafiction. Several pieces revisit characters and settings from Gaiman's earlier novels, while others stand fully on their own, varying in length from a few paragraphs to a full novella.

"A Study in Emerald," the opening story, merges the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle with the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft. Set in an alternate Victorian England where monstrous beings called the Old Ones rule as the world's royal families, an unnamed narrator, a wounded veteran of Afghanistan, shares Baker Street lodgings with a brilliant consulting detective. When Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia, an inhuman royal, is found murdered with green blood splattered across the walls and the German word Rache (revenge) scrawled nearby, the detective traces the killer to Sherry Vernet, an actor and Restorationist revolutionary fighting to free humanity from the Old Ones. Vernet escapes, leaving a letter identifying his accomplice as a limping doctor tentatively named John or James Watson. The story's central conceit inverts the expected Holmesian roles: The narrator and detective are counterparts to Professor Moriarty, Holmes's criminal adversary, while the fugitive Vernet is the true Sherlock Holmes.

"October in the Chair" presents the twelve months of the year as personified figures around a campfire, telling stories. October, warm and autumnal with a multicolored beard, tells the tale of the Runt, a miserable ten-year-old bullied by his twin brothers who runs away from home. Following a river, the Runt sleeps near a tumbledown farmhouse and meets Dearly, a ghost boy buried in a nearby graveyard. They play through the night, exploring the ruins of a dead town and climbing a beech tree. At dawn, Dearly vanishes, and the Runt, unable to face going home, enters the dark farmhouse. What happens inside is never revealed.

"Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire" is a metafictional comedy. In its inner story, a young orphaned governess named Amelia Earnshawe arrives at a nameless mansion during a storm and discovers a hidden compact promising brides to ghoul-lords in the crypt. In the outer story, a young writer living in an actual gothic mansion is revealed to be Amelia's author. He is frustrated because humor keeps invading his attempts at realistic fiction, even as sword-fighting brothers, howling aunts, and watching eyes from paintings surround him. A talking raven suggests he try writing fantasy. The writer abandons his novel and begins writing a mundane domestic scene about a woman making toast, which, in his gothic world, constitutes the most fantastical genre imaginable.

"Bitter Grounds" follows an unnamed narrator who, emotionally dead after a personal loss, drives across America and assumes the identity of a disappeared anthropologist named Jackson Anderton. Using Anderton's hotel reservation and conference registration, the narrator attends an academic conference in New Orleans, presenting a paper on Haitian zombie coffee girls: children who sold coffee door-to-door in early-twentieth-century Port-au-Prince and were believed to be the walking dead. A Santeria priestess tells him about a street kid effectively turned into a zombie through addiction to zombie powder. In the final scene, the narrator acknowledges it is too late to pretend he is alive. A small, gray-skinned girl, one of the zombie coffee girls, appears at his door with a cup of bitter coffee. He drinks it, takes her hand, and they walk into the dawn.

"Harlequin Valentine" is narrated by Harlequin, the trickster figure of the commedia dell'arte, an Italian theatrical tradition built around stock characters, improvisation, and slapstick. On Valentine's Day, Harlequin pins his own heart to the front door of a young woman named Missy in a small Kentucky town. Missy takes the heart to a pathologist, then cuts it up and eats it with ketchup at a café. Having consumed his heart, she can see him. She takes his hat, his wand, and his role, transforming from Columbine, Harlequin's traditional beloved, into a new Harlequin, while he fades into a dishwasher named Pete, a creature of mute longing.

"The Problem of Susan" interrogates the fate of Susan Pevensie in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books. Professor Hastings, a retired academic, is interviewed by a young journalist named Greta Campion. When Greta asks why Susan is excluded from paradise for liking lipstick and parties, the professor reveals that her own family died in a train crash, just as in Lewis's The Last Battle, and she was left to identify the bodies. That night, Greta dreams a nightmare in which the lion devours the children and mates with the white witch on frost-covered grass.

"How to Talk to Girls at Parties" follows two teenage boys, the narrator Enn and his confident friend Vic, who crash a party in 1977 South London populated by alien visitors in human form. Enn talks to several girls: One describes being a tourist incarnated unwillingly into human flesh; another, named Triolet, says she is a poem, a pattern of language that colonized distant worlds by being heard. She whispers the poem into Enn's ear, and he sees towers of glass and feels the advance of an ocean. Vic goes upstairs with the beautiful Stella but returns in terror, dragging Enn away. As they flee, Enn glimpses Stella at the top of the stairs with an expression of inhuman rage.

"Sunbird" follows the Epicurean Club, five eccentric gourmands who have eaten every creature imaginable, as the mysterious, ancient Zebediah T. Crawcrustle leads them to Cairo to hunt and eat the Sunbird. After roasting the bird on an ancient barbecue, the Epicureans eat its transcendent flesh, but the meat grows unbearably hot inside them. Crawcrustle reveals the Sunbird is the Phoenix, which he has been eating for over ten thousand years: Those who have not prepared by consuming coals and fire simply burn away. One by one, the Epicureans combust. A tiny bird stirs in the ashes and flies toward the sun, and Crawcrustle stands renewed as a young man.

"The Monarch of the Glen," the collection's closing novella and a sequel to American Gods, follows Shadow Moon, the novel's protagonist, to the north coast of Scotland. A small, gray-haired man named Dr. Gaskell hires Shadow as a bouncer for a private party at a remote house. Jennie, the hotel barmaid, warns him away, comparing herself to a hulder, a creature from Norse folklore who comes from the woods and falls in love with farmers but can never be truly human. At the party, wealthy guests strip Shadow naked, smear him with grease, and pit him against a hairless creature as part of an ancient ritual. Shadow drops his knife, fights bare-handed, and gains the upper hand, but when the guests advance with clubs to kill the fallen creature, he shields it with his body and calls Jennie's name. She appears, catches a descending club, and the bonfires explode, setting the house ablaze. Shadow carries the creature to the loch, where its mother wades ashore and takes her son. Throughout the story, Shadow dreams of frozen Norse gods who call him Baldur, his birth-certificate name, hinting at a divine identity. When Jennie appears a final time, she tells him she could have been his but he is not a man. On the train south, Shadow decides to return to Chicago, and as a thunderstorm rolls across the sky, he quietly resolves to go home.