Merry Christmas everyone! It’s time for the final story recommendations of the year. For that occasion, I’ve dug out a couple of stories from one of my very favorite writers of all time, Neil Gaiman. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did.
Chivalry by Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors ):
An elderly woman accidentally buys the Holy Grail in a second hand shop. She then have to deal with the kind but tenacious Sir Galahad, who is on a quest to bring the grail back to King Arthur.
This is a sweet, low key story, and it’s Gaiman at his best. He takes the whimsical premise and uses it to create comedy while also treating it with all seriousness, adding a sense of magical realism to the story as well. It’s that balance that all Gaiman’s best stories manage to strike, the odd, the funny, and the profound standing on a point where it could fail and tip over at any moment but never does.
Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar by Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors):
As with “Chivalry”, Gaiman here shows that his best stories often comes into existence when he takes far-out premises and treat them as if they were an everyday occurrence. Here, the MC finds himself stuck at a pub in the middle of nowhere, talking to a pair of drunken Cthulhu acolytes.
One little oddity that Gaiman did extremely well in this story and which somehow adds a lot of realism to and otherwise far-out story is how perfectly he depicts what it’s like to hike using a guidebook written by someone who clearly hasn’t been to the area they’ve written about.
This is another cozy Gaiman piece with little conflict, but somehow it still manages to be very entertaining.
What Happened to Moschops by Adam Knight (DSF):
A funny little piece about mass extinction. The story centers on a screw-up member of an alien race, who decides to impress his teacher with a speciment of the Moschops. This, of course, ends badly. Potentially so for the aliens and definitely for the Moschops.
The Return of the Pig by K. J. Parker (The Book of Magic, edited by Gardner Dozois):
K. J. Parker is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated authors of fantasy out there. He writes quite funny books in the vein of the late Terry Pratchett under his own name, Tom Holt. As K. J. Parker he writes more classical fantasy stories, though always with unique and strange twists.
Here, he provides a story with a unique magic elements, scholary mages who are more feared than loved, and one such mage who has to go back to his backwater home town and face the past he has tried so hard to forget as something more dangerous.
Toby Backman 