Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman

Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Here’s s funny thing: Neil Gaiman is a fantastic writer, but for some reason I’m not able to get into his books. American Gods was horrible, I couldn’t get into the Ocean at the Edge of the Lane, and Trigger Warning left me disappointed. Anansi Boys is waiting for me on my kindle, and I’m scared to start it.

Trigger Warning was absolutely not what I expected. 24 stories and I hardly even remember them. The one that I liked was Orange, it made me laugh out loud a few times. A very original way of telling a story, doing it in a form of an interview, giving the reader just the answers. Only a masterful writer can pull this off. The other story is The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains. It was by far the best story in the whole book, beautifully written and full of suspense. The rest were kind of meh.

In the beginning Gaiman talks about the genres of the stories and it feels as if he’s apologizing for switching between so many genres (horror, detective, mystery, humor, fairy-tale…) and says something like "it’s not a bad thing to include in one collection stories that have nothing to do with each other" (paraphrased). It’s a matter of personal taste, but I didn’t like it at all. It’s much better when the stories actually have something to do with each other. Otherwise the collection is disjointed and (to me) almost unreadable.

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