Fragile Things

by Neil Gaiman

Genres: Fantasy Anthologies & Collections; Media Tie-In; Short Stories

Synopsis

In this dazzling collection of more than twenty-five pieces of short fiction, including a novella featuring the hero of his masterpiece, American Gods, internationally bestselling author Neil Gaiman charts the terrain between life and death, perception and reality, darkness and light. From an alternate-universe Victorian England to months of the year sitting around chatting, this volume is a gift of wonder guaranteed to dazzle the senses.

Release date: January 1, 2018

Publisher: William Morrow

Print pages: 400

Sample

INTRODUCTION

“I think…that I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.” The words turned up in a dream and I wrote them down upon waking, uncertain what they meant or to whom they applied.

My original plan for this book of tales and imaginings, some eight years ago, was to create a short story collection that I would call These People Ought to Know Who We Are and Tell That We Were Here, after a word balloon in a panel from a Little Nemo Sunday page (you can now find a beautiful color reproduction of the page in Art Spiegelman’s book In the Shadow of No Towers), and every story would be told by one of a variety of dodgy and unreliable narrators as each explained their life, told us who they were and that, once, they too were here. A dozen people, a dozen stories. That was the idea; and then real life came along and spoiled it, as I began to write the short stories you’ll find in here, and they took on the form they needed to be told in, and while some were told in the first person and were slices of lives, others simply weren’t. One story refused to take shape until I gave it to the months of the year to tell, while another did small, efficient things with identity that meant it had to be told in the third person.

Eventually I began to gather together the material of this book, puzzling over what I should call it now that the previous title seemed no longer to apply. It was then that the One Ring Zero CD As Smart as We Are arrived, and I heard them sing the lines I had brought back from a dream, and I wondered just what I had meant by “fragile things.”

It seemed like a fine title for a book of short stories. There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

“A STUDY IN EMERALD”

This was written for the anthology my friend Michael Reaves edited with John Pelan, Shadows Over Baker Street. The brief from Michael was “I want a story in which Sherlock Holmes meets the world of H. P. Lovecraft.” I agreed to write a story but suspected there was something deeply unpromising about the setup: the world of Sherlock Holmes is so utterly rational, after all, celebrating solutions, while Lovecraft’s fictional creations were deeply, utterly irrational, and mysteries were vital to keep humanity sane. If I was going to tell a story that combined both elements there had to be an interesting way to do it that played fair with both Lovecraft and with the creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

As a boy I had loved Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton stories, in which dozens of characters from fiction were incorporated into one coherent world, and I had greatly enjoyed watching my friends Kim Newman and Alan Moore build their own Wold Newton–descended worlds in the Anno Dracula sequence and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, respectively. It looked like fun. I wondered if I could try something like that.

The ingredients of the story I had in the back of my head combined in ways that were better than I had hoped when I began. (Writing’s a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won’t rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.)

“A Study in Emerald” won the Hugo Award in August 2004 as Best Short Story, something that still makes me intensely proud. It also played its part in my finding myself, the following year, mysteriously inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars.

“THE FAIRY REEL”

Not much of a poem, really, but enormous fun to read aloud.

“OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR”

Written for Peter Straub, for the remarkable volume of Conjunctions that he guest-edited. It began some years earlier, at a convention in Madison, Wisconsin, at which Harlan Ellison had asked me to collaborate with him on a short story. We were placed inside a rope barrier, Harlan at his typewriter, me at my laptop. But before we could start the short story, Harlan had an introduction to finish, so while he finished his introduction I started this story and showed it to him. “Nope. It reads like a Neil Gaiman story,” he said. (So I put it aside and started another story, which Harlan and I have now been collaborating on ever since. Bizarrely, whenever we get together and work on it, it gets shorter.) So I had part of a story sitting on my hard drive. Peter invited me into Conjunctions a couple of years later. I wanted to write a story about a dead boy and a living one, as a sort of dry run for a book for children I had decided to write (it’s called The Graveyard Book, and I am writing it right now). It took me a little while to figure out how the story worked, and when it was done, I dedicated it to Ray Bradbury, who would have written it much better than I did.

It won the 2003 Locus Award for Best Short Story.

“THE HIDDEN CHAMBER”

Began with a request from two editors, the Nancys Kilpatrick and Holder, to write something “gothic” for their anthology, Outsiders. It seems to me that the story of Bluebeard and its variants is the most gothic of all stories, so I wrote a Bluebeard poem set in the almost empty house I was staying in at the time. Upsettling is what Humpty Dumpty called “a portmanteau word,” occupying the territory between upsetting and unsettling.

“FORBIDDEN BRIDES OF THE FACELESS SLAVES IN THE SECRET HOUSE OF THE NIGHT OF DREAD DESIRE”

I started writing this story in pencil one windy winter’s night in the waiting room between platforms five and six of East Croydon railway station. I was twenty-two, going on twenty-three. When it was done I typed it up and showed it to a couple of editors I knew. One sniffed, told me it wasn’t his kind of thing and he didn’t honestly think it was actually anybody’s kind of thing, while the other read it, looked sympathetic, and gave it back explaining that the reason it would never be printed was that it was facetious nonsense. I put it away, glad to have been saved the public embarrassment of having more people read it and dislike it.

The story stayed unread, wandering from folder to box to tub, from office to basement to attic, for another twenty years, and when I thought of it, it was only with relief that it had not been printed. One day I was asked for a story for an anthology called Gothic! and I remembered the manuscript in the attic and went up to find it, to see if there was anything in it that I could rescue.

I started reading “Forbidden Brides,” and as I read it I smiled. Actually, I decided, it was pretty funny, and it was smart, too; a good little story—the clumsinesses were mostly the sort of things you’d find in journeyman work, and all of them seemed easily fixable. I got out the computer and did another draft of the story, twenty years after the first, shortened the title to its present form, and sent it off to the editor. At least one reviewer felt it was facetious nonsense, but that seemed to be a minority opinion, as “Forbidden Brides” was picked up by several “best-of-the-year” anthologies and was voted Best Short Story in the 2005 Locus Awards.

I’m not sure what we can learn from that. Sometimes you just show stories to the wrong people, and nobody’s going to like everything. From time to time I wonder what else there is in the boxes in the attic.

“GOOD BOYS DESERVE FAVORS,” “THE FLINTS OF MEMORY LANE”

One story was inspired by a Lisa Snellings-Clark statue of a man holding a double bass, just as I did when I was a child; the other was written for an anthology of real-life ghost stories. Most of the other authors managed tales that were rather more satisfying than mine, although mine had the unsatisfying advantage of being perfectly true. These stories were first collected in Adventures in the Dream Trade, a miscellany published by NESFA Press in 2002, which collected lots of introductions and oddments and such.

“CLOSING TIME”

Michael Chabon was editing a book of genre stories to demonstrate how much fun stories are and to raise funds for 826 Valencia, which helps children to write. (The book was published as McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.) He asked me for a story, and I asked if there was any particular genre he was missing. There was—he wanted an M. R. James–style ghost story.

So I set out to write a proper ghost story, but the finished tale owes much more to my love of the “strange stories” of Robert Aickman than it does to James (however, it also, once it was done, turned out to be a club story, thus managing two genres for the price of one). The story was picked up by some “best-of-the-year” anthologies, and took the Locus Award for Best Short Story in 2004.

All the places in this story are true places, although I have changed a few names—the Diogenes Club was really the Troy Club in Hanway Street, for example. Some of the people and events are true as well, truer than one might imagine. As I write this I find myself wondering whether that little playhouse still exists, or if they knocked it down and built houses on the ground where it waited, but I confess I have no desire actually to go and find out.

“GOING WODWO”

A wodwo, or wodwose, was a wild man of the woods. This was written for Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow’s anthology The Green Man.

“BITTER GROUNDS”

I wrote four short stories in 2002, and this was, I suspect, the best of the lot, although it won no awards. It was written for my friend Nalo Hopkinson’s anthology Mojo: Conjure Stories.

“OTHER PEOPLE”

I don’t remember where I was or when on the day I came up with this little Mobius story. I remember jotting down the idea and the first line, and then wondering if it was original—was I half remembering a story I’d read as a boy, something by Fredric Brown or Henry Kuttner? It felt like someone else’s story, too elegant and edgy and complete an idea, and I was suspicious of it.

A year or so later, bored on a plane, I ran across my note about the story and, having finished the magazine I was reading, I simply wrote it—it was finished before the plane landed. Then I called a handful of knowledgeable friends and read it to them, asking if it seemed familiar, if anyone had read it before. They said no. Normally I write short stories because someone has asked me to write a short story, but for once in my life I had a short story nobody was waiting for. I sent it to Gordon Van Gelder at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and he accepted and retitled it, which was fine by me. (I’d called it “Afterlife.”)

I do a lot of writing on planes. When I began writing American Gods I wrote a story on a plane to New York that would, I was certain, wind up somewhere in the fabric of the book, but I could never find anywhere in the book it wanted to go. Eventually, when the book was finished and the story wasn’t in it, I made it into a Christmas card and sent it out and forgot about it. A couple of years later Hill House Press, who publish extremely nice limited editions of my books, sent it out to subscribers as a Christmas card of their own.

It never had a title. Let’s call it,

 

THE MAPMAKER

 

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.

The tale is the map which is the territory.

You must remember this.

There was an emperor of China almost two thousand years ago who became obsessed by the notion of mapping the land that he ruled. He had China recreated in miniature on an island which he had constructed at great expense and, incidentally, a certain amount of loss of life (for the waters were deep and cold) in a lake in the imperial estates. On this island each mountain was become a molehill, and each river the smallest rivulet. It took fully half an hour for the emperor to walk around the perimeter of his island.

Every morning, in the pale light before dawn, a hundred men would wade and swim out to the island and would carefully repair and reconstruct any feature of the landscape which had been damaged by the weather or by wild birds, or taken by the lake; and they would remove and remodel any of the imperial lands that had been damaged in actuality by floods or earthquakes or landslides, to better reflect the world as it was.

The emperor was contented by this, for the better part of a year, and then he noticed within himself a growing dissatisfaction with his island, and he began, in the time before he slept, to plan another map, fully one one-hundredth the size of his dominions. Every hut and house and hall, every tree and hill and beast would be reproduced at one one-hundredth of its height.

It was a grand plan, which would have taxed the imperial treasury to its limits to accomplish. It would have needed more men than the mind can encompass, men to map and men to measure, surveyors, census-takers, painters; it would have taken model-makers, potters, builders, and craftsmen. Six hundred professional dreamers would have been needed to reveal the nature of things hidden beneath the roots of trees, and in the deepest mountain caverns, and in the depths of the sea, for the map, to be worth anything, needed to contain both the visible empire and the invisible.

This was the emperor’s plan.

His minister of the right hand remonstrated with him one night, as they walked in the palace gardens, under a huge, golden moon.

“You must know, Imperial Majesty,” said the minister of the right hand, “that what you intend is….”

And then, courage failing him, he paused. A pale carp broke the surface of the water, shattering the reflection of the golden moon into a hundred dancing fragments, each a tiny moon in its own right, and then the moons coalesced into one unbroken circle of reflected light, hanging golden in water the color of the night sky, which was so rich a purple that it could never have been mistaken for black.

“Impossible?” asked the emperor, mildly. It is when emperors and kings are at their mildest that they are at their most dangerous.

“Nothing that the emperor wishes could ever conceivably be impossible,” said the minister of the right hand. “It will, however, be costly. You will drain the imperial treasury to produce this map. You will empty cities and farms to make the land to place your map upon. You will leave behind you a country that your heirs will be too poor to govern. As your advisor, I would be failing in my duties if I did not advise you of this.”

“Perhaps you are right,” said the emperor. “Perhaps. But if I were to listen to you and to forget my map world, to leave it unconsummated, it would haunt my world and my mind, and it would spoil the taste of the food on my tongue and of the wine in my mouth.”

And then he paused. Far away in the gardens they could hear the sound of a nightingale. “But this map land,” confided the emperor, “is still only the beginning. For even as it is being constructed, I shall already be pining for and planning my masterpiece.”

“And what would that be?” asked the minister of the right hand, mildly.

“A map,” said the emperor, “of the Imperial Dominions, in which each house shall be represented by a life-sized house, every mountain shall be depicted by a mountain, every tree by a tree of the same size and type, every river by a river, and every man by a man.”

The minister of the right hand bowed low in the moonlight, and he walked back to the Imperial Palace several respectful paces behind the emperor, deep in thought.

It is recorded that the emperor died in his sleep, and that is true, as far as it goes—although it could be remarked that his death was not entirely unassisted; and his oldest son, who became emperor in his turn, had little interest in maps or mapmaking.

The island in the lake became a haven for wild birds and all kinds of waterfowl, with no man to drive them away. They pecked down the tiny mud mountains to build their nests, and the lake eroded the shore of the island, and in time it was forgotten entirely, and only the lake remained.

The map was gone, and the mapmaker, but the land lived on.

“KEEPSAKES AND TREASURES”

This story, subtitled “A Love Story,” began life as a comic, or part of it did, written for Oscar Zarate’s noir collection, It’s Dark in London, illustrated by Warren Pleece. Warren did an excellent job, but I was dissatisfied with the story, and I wondered what had made the man who called himself Smith what he was. Al Sarrantonio asked me for a story for his 999 anthology, and I decided it would be interesting to revisit Smith and Mr. Alice and their story. They also turn up in another tale in this collection.

I think there are more stories about the unpleasant Mr. Smith to be told, particularly the one in which he and Mr. Alice come to a parting of the ways.

“THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH”

This story began when I was shown a Frank Frazetta painting of a savage woman flanked by tigers and asked to write a story to accompany it. I couldn’t think of a story, so I told what happened to Miss Finch instead.

“STRANGE LITTLE GIRLS”

…is really a set of twelve very short stories, written to accompany Tori Amos’s CD Strange Little Girls. Inspired by Cindy Sherman and by the songs themselves, Tori created a persona for each of the songs, and I wrote a story for each persona. It’s never been collected anywhere, although it was published in the tour book, and lines from the stories were scattered throughout the CD booklet.

“HARLEQUIN VALENTINE”

Lisa Snellings-Clark is a sculptor and artist whose work I have loved for years. There was a book called Strange Attraction, based on a Ferris wheel Lisa had made; a number of fine writers wrote stories for the passengers in the cars. I was asked if I would write a story inspired by the ticket-seller, a grinning harlequin.

So I did.

On the whole, stories don’t write themselves, but for this one all I really remember making up was the first sentence. After that it was a lot like taking dictation as Harlequin gleefully danced and tumbled through his Valentine’s Day.

Harlequin was the trickster figure of the commedia dell’arte, an invisible prankster with his mask and magical stick, his costume covered with diamond shapes. He loved Columbine, and would pursue her through each entertainment, coming up against such stock figures as the doctor and the clown, transforming each person he encountered on the way.

“LOCKS”

“Goldilocks and the Three Bears” was a story by the poet Robert Southey. Or rather, it wasn’t—his version told of an old woman and the three bears. The form of the story and what happened was right, but people knew that the story needed to be about a little girl rather than an old woman, and when they retold it, they put her in.

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are the currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.) My daughter Maddy, who was two when I wrote this for her, is eleven, and we still share stories, but they are now on television or films. We read the same books and talk about them, but I no longer read them to her, and even that was a poor replacement for telling her stories out of my head.

I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.

“THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN”

The doctor the hotel had called told me the reason my neck hurt so badly, that I was throwing up and in pain and confused, was flu, and he began to list painkillers and muscle relaxants he thought I might appreciate. I picked a painkiller from the list and stumbled back to my hotel room, where I passed out, unable to move or think or hold my head up straight. On the third day my own doctor from home called, alerted by my assistant, Lorraine, and talked to me. “I don’t like to make diagnoses over the phone, but you have meningitis,” he said, and he was right, I did.

It was some months before I could think clearly enough to write, and this was the first piece of fiction I attempted. It was like learning to walk all over again. It was written for Al Sarrantonio’s Flights, an anthology of fantasy stories.

I read the Narnia books to myself hundreds of times as a boy, and then aloud as an adult, twice, to my children. There is so much in the books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction, and to talk about the remarkable power of children’s literature.

“INSTRUCTIONS”

Although I put several poems into Smoke and Mirrors, my last collection, I had originally planned that this collection would be prose only. I eventually decided to put the poems in anyway, mostly because I like this one so much. If you’re one of the people who doesn’t like poems, you may console yourself with the knowledge that they are, like this introduction, free. The book would cost you the same with or without them, and nobody pays me anything extra to put them in. Sometimes it’s nice to have something short to pick up and read and put down again, just as sometimes it’s interesting knowing a little about the background of a story, and you don’t have to read it, either. (And while I’ve spent weeks cheerfully agonizing about what order to put this collection into, how best to shape and order it, you can—and should—read it in any way that strikes your fancy.)

Quite literally, a set of instructions for what to do when you find yourself in a fairy tale.

“HOW DO YOU THINK IT FEELS?”

I was asked for a story for an anthology themed about gargoyles, and, deadline approaching, found myself feeling rather blank.

Gargoyles, it occurred to me, were placed upon churches and cathedrals to protect them. I wondered if a gargoyle could be placed on something else to protect it. Such as, for example, a heart….

Having just reread it for the first time in eight years, I found myself mildly surprised by the sex, but that’s probably just general dissatisfaction with the story.

“MY LIFE”

This odd little monologue was written to accompany a photograph of a sock monkey in a book of two hundred photographs of sock monkeys called, not surprisingly, Sock Monkeys, by photographer Arne Svenson. The sock monkey in the photo I was given looked like he’d had a hard sort of life, but an interesting one.

An old friend of mine had just started writing for the Weekly World News, and I’d had much fun making up stories for her to use. I started wondering whether there was, somewhere out there, someone who had a Weekly World News sort of a life. In Sock Monkeys it was printed as prose, but I like it better with the line breaks. I have no doubt that, given enough alcohol and a willing ear, it could go on forever. (Occasionally people write to me at my Web site to find out if I would mind if they use this, or other bits of mine, as audition pieces. I don’t mind.)

“FIFTEEN PAINTED CARDS FROM A VAMPIRE TAROT”

There are seven stories still to go in the Major Arcana, and I’ve promised artist Rick Berry that I’ll write them one day, and then he can paint them.

“FEEDERS AND EATERS”

This story was a nightmare I had in my twenties.

I love dreams. I know enough about them to know that dream logic is not story logic, and that you can rarely bring a dream back as a tale: it will have transformed from gold into leaves, from silk to cobwebs, on waking.

Still, there are things you can bring back with you from dreams: atmosphere, moments, people, a theme. This is the only time I can remember bringing back a whole story, though.

I first wrote it as a comic, illustrated by the multitalented Mark Buckingham, and then later tried re-imagining it as an outline for a pornographic horror film I’d never make (a story called “Eaten: Scenes from a Moving Picture”). A few years ago editor Steve Jones asked me if I would like to resurrect an unjustly forgotten story of mine for his Keep Out the Night anthology, and I remembered this story and rolled up my sleeves and started to type.

Shaggy inkcaps are indeed wonderfully tasty mushrooms, but they do deliquesce into an unpleasant, black, inky substance shortly after you’ve picked them, which is why you will never see them in shops.

“DISEASEMAKER’S CROUP”

I was asked to write an entry in a book of imaginary diseases (The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts). It seemed to me that an imaginary disease about making imaginary diseases might be interesting. I wrote it with the aid of a long-forgotten computer program called Babble and a dusty, leather-bound book of advice to the home physician.

“IN THE END”

I was trying to imagine the very last book of the Bible.

And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means “that thing over there.” (“Quick, brave Himalayan Guide—what’s that thing over there?”

“Yeti.”

“I see.”)

“GOLIATH”

“They want you to write a story,” said my agent, some years ago. “It’s to go on the Web site of a film that hasn’t come out yet, called The Matrix. They’re sending you a script.” I read the film script with interest, and wrote this story, which went up onto the Web a week or so before the film came out, and is still there.

“PAGES FROM A JOURNAL FOUND IN A SHOEBOX LEFT IN A GREYHOUND BUS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN TULSA, OKLAHOMA, AND LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY”

This was written for my friend Tori Amos’s Scarlet’s Walk tour book, several years ago, and it made me extremely happy when it was picked up for a “best-of-the-year” anthology. It’s a story inspired very loosely by the music of Scarlet’s Walk. I wanted to write something about identity and travel and America, like a tiny companion piece to American Gods, in which everything, including any kind of resolution, hovered just out of reach.

“HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES”

The process of writing a story fascinates me as much as the outcome. This one, for example, began life as two different (failed) attempts to write an account of a tourist holiday on Earth, intended for Australian critic and editor Jonathan Strahan’s upcoming anthology The Starry Rift. (The story is not in there. This is the first time it’s appeared in print. I’m going to write another story for Jonathan’s book instead, I hope.) The tale I had in mind wasn’t working; I just had a couple of fragments that didn’t go anywhere. I was doomed and had started sending e-mails to Jonathan telling him that there wasn’t going to be a story, at least, not one from me. He wrote back telling me he’d just got an excellent story in from an author I admired, and she wrote it in twenty-four hours.

So, nettled, I took an empty notebook and a pen and I went down to the gazebo at the bottom of the garden and during the course of the afternoon I wrote this story. I got to read it aloud for the first time a few weeks later at a benefit at the legendary CBGBs. It was the best possible location to read a story about punk and 1977, and it made me feel very happy.

“THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME”

Written in a hotel room in New York the week I read the audio book of my novel Stardust, while waiting for a car to come and take me away, for editor and poet Rain Graves, who had asked me for a couple of poems for her Web site at www.spiderwords.com. I was happy to discover that it worked when read before an audience.

“SUNBIRD”

My oldest daughter, Holly, told me exactly what she wanted for her eighteenth birthday. “I want something nobody else could ever give me, Dad. I want you to write me a short story.” And then, because she knows me well, she added, “And I know you’re always late, and I don’t want to stress you out or anything, so as long as I get it by my nineteenth birthday, you’re fine.”

There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable—you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.

“Sunbird” was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look. Holly didn’t get it until her nineteen-and-a-halfth birthday, when I was in the middle of writing Anansi Boys and decided that if I didn’t finish writing something—anything—I would probably go mad. With her permission it was published in a book with an extremely long title, often abbreviated to Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t As Scary…, as a benefit for the literacy program 826 NYC.

Even if you have this book, you might still want to pick up a copy of the book with the extremely long title, because it has Clement Freud’s story “Grimble” in it.

“INVENTING ALADDIN”

One thing that puzzles me (and I use puzzle here in the technical sense of really, really irritates me) is reading, as from time to time I have, learned academic books on folktales and fairy stories that explain why nobody wrote them and which go on to point out that looking for authorship of folktales is in itself a fallacy; the kind of books or articles that give the impression that all stories were stumbled upon or, at best, reshaped, and I think, Yes, but they all started somewhere, in someone’s head. Because stories start in minds—they aren’t artifacts or natural phenomena.

One scholarly book I read explained that any fairy story in which a character falls asleep obviously began life as a dream that was recounted on waking by a primitive type unable to tell dreams from reality, and this was the starting point for our fairy stories—a theory which seemed filled with holes from the get-go, because stories, the kind that survive and are retold, have narrative logic, not dream logic.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There’s the magic of it.

Scheherazade as a narrator was a fiction, as was her sister and the murderous king they needed nightly to placate. The Arabian Nights are a fictional construct, assembled from a variety of places, and the story of Aladdin is itself a late tale, folded into the Nights by the French only a few hundred years ago. Which is another way of saying that when it began, it certainly didn’t begin as I describe. And yet. And still.

“THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN”

A story that began with, and exists because of, my love of the remoter parts of Scotland, where the bones of the Earth show through, and the sky is a pale white, ...