This unsurprising quality is not bad, just different. There’s a story about a troll who wants to “eat the life” of a victim, which essentially means … well, I’ll let you guess. Smoke and Mirrors is rife with examples like this: “Snow, Glass, Apples” reimagines Snow White as a vampire child and the Queen as a heroine protecting her realm-it all ends poorly for her, still. When there are twists, you can often see them coming. Gaiman is a writer who loves to play with and subvert tropes, but he does it in very obvious ways. I have to say that the more I read Gaiman’s stories the less unexpected or surprising they seem, if you know what I mean. Unlike the other collection, Smoke and Mirrors’ introduction also comes with a bonus short story embedded. As with Fragile Things this earlier collection has a description of each story’s origin in the introduction. Now that I own copies of Neil Gaiman’s three short story anthologies, I re-read Fragile Things and then tackled this one, Smoke and Mirrors.
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