Fragile Things is not a conventional short story collection. It is quite possibly an odd and approximate sketch of what the inside of Neil Gaiman's head looks like.  

Stories, as Gaiman says in the introduction, are fragile things made up of 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks and yet they outlast the people and lands that create them. Fragile Things is a collection of dreams: some vivid some vague. Gaiman takes inspiration from everything: from Narnia and Sherlock Holmes to wedding invitations he receives in the mail. There is nothing consistent about Gaiman's assortment of short stories - the book contains stories that look like potential novels, followed by 100-word stories that are more relevant as writing exercises and interspersed with poems. The original title that Gaiman wanted to give this book was: These People Ought to Know Who We Are and Tell That We Were Here, however real life came along. 

This book lives up to Gaiman's reputation as an inveterate storyteller. Every story has a narrator, in Gaiman's words—dodgy and unreliable narrators: they are fantasy writers, drifters posing as anthropologists or a month of the year. Sometimes these storytellers hand over their narrative to another character. "Feeders and Eaters" that begins with its protagonist stranded in the wrong part of town, slips into the story of an old acquaintance he meets at a squalid cafe, and the hungry woman (or something that appears as a woman) his acquaintance keeps at home. The ones that I personally, would re-read time again would be the following five: The Problem with Susan, Gaiman's heart-warming spin on Susan's story years after Narnia becomes nothing more than faded memories. Harlequin Valentine, a short story based on the Harlequinade pantomime, who gives his heart only to have it eaten. Other People, which seemed to be Gaiman's take on after-life. Instructions, a poem about how to navigate inside a magical land and come back with your dreams intact. And most importantly, A Study In Emerald, where the worlds of H.P Lovecraft and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle collide in another case for the Baker Street detective. 

What becomes a more interesting read (and this is a case for all of Gaiman's books) is the introduction. Gaiman writes the most intriguing introductions, punctuated with anecdotes about his travels and stories about his stories. Sometimes, little stories that never fit anywhere else are stitched inside the seams of the introduction. This collection is no exception. 

While many of these stories are Gaiman's best works, this collection carries the sense of being bounded together without thought, mostly because it was a simple round-up of anthologised stories. While that makes the book raggedly charming, the unevenness and stories that pose as filler content can dampen the experience for the readers. 

Ishrat Jahan  writes things and gets mistaken for a twelve-year-old, when she isn't procrasti-reading, she tries to salvage her undergrad degree. Mail her at [email protected]