Trigger Warning

Neil Gaiman’s newest book is titled Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances. In the best-selling authors latest compilation of short stories and verse he twists and turns reality into a darker and more mysterious version of itself. In the introduction he explains the impetus for the book: “I’m thinking rather about those images and word or ideas that drop like trapdoors beneath us, throwing us out of our safe, sane world into a place much more dark and less welcoming.” His book does not fail to perform. This collection compiles an array of works written at different times and for different purposes. There is the unsettling story of an imaginary girlfriend, an episode of Doctor Who, and a Sherlock Homes story. He includes his superb re-visioning of Sleeping Beauty “The Sleeper and the Spindle.” There is the perfectly dark and ominous tale “The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains” about a mysterious stranger and a cave full of cursed treasures. The reader is even treated with a story about the beloved character, Shadow, in the story “Black Dog.” It is a wonderfully haunting book by a master storyteller that is full of imagination, terror, mystery, and fantasy.