First Lines: Pickings from the Neil Gaiman Humble Bundle

Last year, a Humble Bundle of Neil Gaiman rarities was released. It included a pile of hard to find, out of print and obscure books and comics, with a 100% of the author’s earnings going to his charitable foundation, which in turn supports various Good Causes™.

So, I loaded the most e-reader friendly files onto my e-reader — I found out that pdfs and epubs containing jpegs of scanned text don’t really work ¹, so I’ll have to get round to those some other way — and got cracking.

Manuscript Found in a Milkbottle is story written and published once, in 1985, that is so bad I’ve never let it be reprinted. Not even to give young writers hope that if I was that awful once, there is hope for all of them. It is, indeed, quite ungood, and is basically a very long and very lame joke involving unwatched milk and faster than light travel.

Book read

Neil Gaiman — Manuscript Found in a Milk Bottle

First line

Milkmen have secrets

A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff (table of contents) is one of several rarities and B-sides collections in the Bundle. It collects some stories — “Featherquest” is an early one, which like Ms. Found in a Milkbottle is not quite good yet and ends very unsatisfying:

Three stories (“Jerusalem, “Feminine Endings” and “Oranges”) can be found in Trigger Warning, and “Orphee” I knew from Chris Riddell’s illustrations (part 1 and 2 or alternate version). Then there are two poems, a few book reviews and some essays and posts lifted from his weblog. Some of which will no doubt reappear in the upcoming non-fiction collection The View from the Cheap Seats. That title comes from one of the entries included here, after all.

Book read

Neil Gaiman — A Little Gold Book of Ghastly Stuff

First line

Before you read this familiarise yourself
with the text. Note the position of the escape hatches,
the candles that will light in the event of a forced landing
to show you the way out. The author will make an
announcement. (from “Before You Read This”)

Ghastly Beyond Belief: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations (edited by Gaiman with Kim Newman) contains, as one would suspect, quotes from Science Fiction and Fantasy books and movies. At first it was fun, and then it went on and on and on and it got a bit long in the teeth and after it went on for a bit more, I was quite over it.

Book read

Ghastly Beyond Belief: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of Quotations (edited by Gaiman with Kim Newman)

First line

A blurb is a brief description of the contents of a book, designed to tease or entice a casual browser into buying it.

It will come as no surprise that Day of the Dead (An Annotated Babylon 5 Script) contains the (annotated) script of the Babylon 5 episode “Day of the Dead”. Even without any knowledge of Babylon 5, I could make sense of it, and it was quite enjoyable.

Book read

Neil Gaiman — Day of the Dead (An Annotated Babylon 5 Script)

First line

INT. MESS HALL

Lochley in the mess, eating and reading at the same time.

Angels and Visitations: A Miscellany (ToC) is the most proper short story collection of the Bundle. It is a small press book, published to mark Gaiman’s 10th anniversary as a professional writer, and long out of print. Nine of its twenty-two pieces were later republished in Smoke & Mirrors, and “Troll-Bridge”, “Chivalry” and “Murder Mysteries” stood out as being particularly enjoyable upon revisiting them. The, well, experimental “Being an Experiment Upon Strictly Scientific Lines” got some fighting words, though:

Book read

Neil Gaiman — Angels and Visitations: A Miscellany

First line

Let us call now for the makers of strong images (from “The Song of the Audience”)

Adventures in the Dream Trade (ToC) contains more b-sides and rarities. Mostly introductions, a few song lyrics, some short stories, but mostly, Gaiman’s 2001 American Gods web log. The blog documents the work that goes into turning a manuscript into a book, and Gaiman’s signing tour through the US, UK and Canada. It’s endearingly clumsy, with all its I wrote this interesting bit, clicked publish, and — whoops, Blogger went and ate it. Again. and its We’ll have the FAQ thing up and running in a jiffy. Although I am not convinced Mister Gaiman would use the word ‘jiffy’. It’s also quite interesting to see how well it holds up, fifteen years later, mostly out of context, and with most of the included links dead as a very dead thing. It convinced me of two things: 1) Gaiman can even tell mundane daily going-ons in a captivating way, and 2) I really need to re-read American Gods sooner rather than later.

Book read

Neil Gaiman — Adventures in the Dream Trade

First line

At the Request of Norton I, Emperor of the United States, the Imperial Historical Pantaloon and Jester-Without-Portfolio Enters the Following: (from “The Introduction” by John M. Ford)

Finally, I read A Fall of Stardust (ToC), which started life as an art portfolio (more on that) accompanied by two chapbooks. One contained the story “The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse” by Susanna Clarke and is omitted here on account of not being written by Neil Gaiman. The other one — as one might guess — contains four short pieces by Gaiman: a prologue to Stardust called Wall: A Prologue, followed by more poetry in the form of a triolet, a song and a pantoum.

Book read

Neil Gaiman — A Fall of Stardust

First line

It wasn’t black and white, not when you saw it up close. (from “Wall: A Prologue”)

Footnote 1: That said, some brute-force jiggering was required: my e-reader insisted that Adventures in the Dream Trade was corrupted with Adobe DRM, which it most certainly wasn’t. Running it through Calibre solved that. A Fall of Stardust was of the it’s-all-jpgs variety, which I turned into a properly edited epub myself. Geeking out FTW.