The things that go bump in the night: Review of Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

Finally, my very first Neil Gaiman novel! After hearing so much about him from so many of my friends, I was just dying to get my hands on one of his books. Although this book didn’t have the graphic art that his Sandman series is famous for, it was still worth the wait!

Trigger warning is a collection of short stories written by Neil Gaiman over the period of his career as a journalist and a writer. Some of his best and award winning stories have been included in this book. Some of them are as short as 2 pages long while some are far longer. The theme that the author picks to create this collection is a theme that he seems to be very comfortable with, which is fantasy and horror. For those of you who know about the stuff I read, you’d know that horror is not something that I’ve tried before simply because I try to avoid anything that can keep me up at night. But I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from a Gaiman novel so I didn’t think twice before reading it. Now here’s my dilemma, how am I supposed to write a review of a collection of short stories? Each one varied drastically from the other as some were boring while others were simply brilliant. I could talk about the writing style and all that but that’s just not my style of reviewing so I’m going to skip that as well. So that leaves me very confused but I’m still going to write something because that’s what one of the very first stories in this book taught me – That if you want to get better at writing then you need to keep writing. Gaiman writes an absolute nonsense story about assembling a chair simply to show that he had writer’s block while writing it but he still went ahead and wrote something because that’s the only way he would get better.

After that initial shock of absolute randomness, Gaiman goes on to show why he’s one of the most popular writers today. He often takes stories that have already been told like “Sleeping Beauty” and “Doctor Who” and put a spin on it of the type that only he can. I was left spellbound by the way he interpreted some of these stories. In the beginning he introduces the book as one that would create the same feeling within you that you would feel if a trapdoor opened beneath your feet and you fell into an endless pit. That one split second of fear when you don’t know what’s going to happen is what he tries to create. And let me tell you that he does it brilliantly! He never quite reaches the stage in horror where he shows the ghost or thing that is out to kill you. He keeps building up to it, slowly setting the stage for the big finish but then he’ll just leave it at that. He’ll leave it to the reader to imagine whatever horrors he has cooked up and he’ll leave it to them to deal with it in whatever way they wish. There are no happy endings in these stories. There are no endings in fact. You can figure that out on your own. And this trick that he plays on this readers is what makes this book so brilliant.

I’m most certainly looking forward to reading more from him and hope to get my hands on a graphic novel of his very soon. If you’re looking for something very nonsensical and light then I would certainly suggest that you read this book. You can most certainly count me among the countless fans that he has in the world now.

My Rating: 3.5/5