A Recommendation

I told you I'd write more often if not as voluminously, and here you are--the vague sense that sometimes I deliver on my promises.

That said, I have a book recommendation to make. It puts me behind the times, certainly, but Amazon.com just recommended a book to me that I read three years ago, so I'm not the only one.

It is possible that some of you here may have heard of Neil Gaiman. Of that subset, some of you may have heard of The Sandman, widely considered Gaiman's opus. What you may not have heard of is a short story collection called The Sandman Book of Dreams.

I don't generally go for spin-off short story collections; my tastes there range either to authors I already know and love for their longer works, or what I can only term "high concept" collections whose themes are, shall we say, slightly eclectic. But this past week I found that linguistic history, while interesting, was making my brain bleed, and that I needed something wonderful to read, something that inspired me to play more freely with prose, lest I miss a call for submissions that I've been trying to address for most of the month. But I was broke, and so I hunted through the books I had, wondering what I could read, or re-read; and I found this, and thought "Huh. Well, I liked The Sandman; maybe it's time to abandon the snobbishness and see if a spin-off collection can work".

It can.

The book is old by most modern standards--the edition I have was printed in 1996. It has one or two authors in it you may have heard of: say, Gene Wolfe. Or John M. Ford. Or Susanna Clarke*. And like any collection of this nature it has its weak moments (or at least, I think so, but it's been a decade since I liked anything written by Nanci A. Collins). However, it also has its strong moments, and they are strong not just for spin-offs, not just for short stories, but for literature. There are stories in here that I would not hesitate to say were pure magic.

Gene Wolfe's "Ain't You Most Done?" is hallucinatory and transcendent. Tad Williams' "The Writer's Child" is one of the only stories about child abuse that I've read that has not been trite--and it's got a couple wonderful bits of literary trivia in it, to boot. Will Shetterly takes us back to one of the more awful and blackly humorous Sandman moments from the The Doll's House era. And then, there's Delia Sherman.

I had never heard of Delia Sherman before this collection. Turns out she's been around for a while and I'd just managed to avoid colliding with her prose. Her contribution is entitled "The Witch's Heart", and when it started I was ready for this to be the first real, true weak link, ignoring that I'd thought the same thing previously in the collection. What I got, after I took a deep breath and started her story over with a fresh mind, was one of the more astounding moments in my career as a reader.

I pride myself on being difficult to shock. I read Chuck Palahniuk's "Guts" while I was eating lunch one day. I made it through most of a Saw movie with a disdainful smirk, barring a now-passed phobia of needles. I could paint more examples but I'm afraid they'll make me sound like some sort of ghoul; the truth is, violence in media doesn't bother me. If anything it prevents me from being bothered. But there is a passage in "The Witch's Heart" that had me crawling up against the window next to my train seat, filled with sympathetic pain and sorrow for the main character. I had to put a hand over my mouth so I didn't shout out "No!". Well done, Ms. Sherman.

"The Witch's Heart" is near the middle of the collection. I have to assure you: it only gets better from there.

If you're here, you've probably read my writing, and I dare to think you might have enjoyed it. So here's my suggestion: Go out. Read this collection. You'll see reflected here the land I've been trying to write my way into for a very, very long time.

*Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, in case you weren't sure.